Contrastive focus reduplication and the modification puzzle

Abstract

In this short paper we present a so far unnoticed syntactic constraint on contrastive focus reduplication (CR), a phenomenon that restricts the semantics of the reduplicated element to a prototypical meaning (but has other uses as well): The CR construction cannot be modified. In the case of nominal CR, this means that adjectival modification is blocked, as in *black COFFEE-coffee. We present data from English and German to support our claim and highlight how earlier accounts fail to capture the syntactic restriction. We then provide a sketch of an analysis couched with a Cartographic framework, tentatively proposing that CR results either (i) from cyclical movement of phrasal material through the specifiers of functional projections into the specifier of a focus phrase or (ii) by directly moving phrasal material into the specifier of a focus phrase.

Keywords

• Contrastive focus
• contrastive focus reduplication
• reduplication
• German
• English
• compounding