Reduplication in English and Arabic: A Contrastive Study

Abstract

Reduplication is a morphological process where the base of a word or part of it is repeated completely or with a slight change. The present study aims to investigate reduplication and its similarities and differences in English and Arabic languages concerning definition, classification, productivity, uses, universality from phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects. The process of reduplication has attracted very much the attention of linguists in recent decades. This study is based on the Principles and Parameters Theory of Generative Grammar (Chomsky, 1981). It is a contrastive qualitative analytic study. The data of this study has been collected from different resources in English and Arabic such as various books, articles, researches, dictionaries etc. This study has shown that there are similarities and differences between reduplicatives in English and Arabic. The results support the Principles and Parameters Theory of Generative Grammar