Contrastive Study Between Chinese And Malagasy Verb Reduplication

Under the guideline of contrastive analysis and conceptual metaphor theories,this paper based on existing researches about chinese and malagasy verb reduplications attempts to find similarities and differences between the structures,semantic and pragmatic functions of verb reduplications in both languages.Reduplication process exists both in chinese and malagasy even though they belong to different language system(isolated and inflectional).Word order also differs as chinese basic sentence structure is SVO and malagasy VOS but with the use of some markers,sentences in malagasy can also present SVO structure.We believe that the functions of verb reduplication in both chinese and malagasy present similarities.The voice and tense in malagasy verbs are marked by the attachment of a particle in front of the affix and by the affix itself so sometimes,an affix can restrict the replicability of a verb.Aspect in chinese is usually marked by a particle placed between the original verb and its reduplicated form as in "V le V",while in malagasy it is achieved by the means of an adverb placed before the verb "adv+VV".Moreover,the internal structure of verb reduplication is different in both languages but in some cases,the external form present similarities such as chinese“AA”,“AAB” and malagasy "VV","VV +N" patterns.The meaning of verb reduplications in both languages is largely identical with only minor differences,used commonly in imperative sentence to express politeness.After being reduplicated,some malagasy neutral verbs can have pejorative sense which is proper to its verb reduplication features.Due to the lack of strict morphological signs in chinese,word classes and syntactic components are not corresponding to each other so as long as the context allows,some components in a sentence can be omitted.These features make the syntactic component of chinese reduplicated verbs more free as they can serve as predicate,adverbial,subject,attribute,complement while in malagasy,they can never be used as complement.