A Study On Morphological Verbal Reduplication

The study on verbal reduplication is a hot topic in Chinese grammar studies. Morphological verbal reduplication is a kind of morphology. This paper consists of four parts. Part One is an introduction of the meaning of the study on morphological verbal reduplication, the problems to be solved in this paper and the research methods. Part Two is a study on phonologic features of verbal reduplication. Part Three is a semantic study on morphological verbal reduplication. Part Four is a cognitive explanation on morphological verbal reduplication. This paper discusses the phonologic features of verbal reduplication. In verbal reduplication, the pronunciation of original morpheme remains the same, and the reduplicated part copies the original segmental features while weakening the stresses: if the origin is stressed, the reduplicated becomes secondary stress; if the origin is non-stressed, the reduplicated becomes light tone. This paper studies base and reduplicated forms of verbal from the perspective of morphology. All the verbs come from Syllabus of Vocabulary of Chinese Proficiency. The examples are from contemporary Chinese corpus of Peking University and other corpus. In this paper, the meanings of verbal reduplication are divided into three kinds: the lexical meaning which the verb itself owns, the syntactic meaning which is partly due to certain grammatical structures and the morphological meaning. This paper distinguishes the three kinds of meaning and discusses the grammatical forms of verbal reduplication from the perspective of morphology, and points out the form and meaning of morpheme in verbal reduplication. In the last part of this paper, the grammatical functions and meanings of verbal reduplication is discussed in the theory of cognitive grammar.