Emphatic affirmative verb reduplication in Spanish

Abstract

In this article, I present a type of verb reduplication observed in Rioplatense Spanish that has not yet been discussed in the literature. This type of construction, which I will call emphatic affirmative verb reduplication, is similar to a type of reduplication present in European Portuguese but has specific properties that make it different and it simultaneously motivates an alternative analysis to that proposed in the literature. Here, I provide a comprehensive description of the phenomenon, situating it within the set of other reduplications, and outline a syntactic proposal that captures the main properties of the phenomenon.

Keywords

• emphatic affirmative reduplication
• Rioplatense Spanish
• local reduplication
• copy theory
• periphrasis