Productive Reduplication in Southern Vietnamese

Abstract

Vietnamese reduplication shows harmony in tone height between base and reduplicant. This paper presents statistical analysis of productive reduplication in southern Vietnamese, which, unlike northern Vietnamese, has only one C tone and phonation of creakiness is not phonemically present. Our main findings show that reduplicative forms with tone-register harmony are used significantly less often than forms without and that the syllabic structure correlates with tone-register harmony preference.

Keywords

• vietnamese
• reduplication
• tones
• tone-register harmony