Vowel alternation in disyllabic reduplicatives: an areal dimension

Abstract

This paper analyzes a variety of languages with regard to vowel alternation patterns in their disyllabic sound symbolic reduplicatives (DSRs). The analysis reveals that (1) a number of different languages have their preferred patterns of vowel alternation for DSRs (e.g. /I/-/ᴅ/ in ding-dong and tick-tock in English) and (2) the relative height of each vowel against the other in a DSRis a linguistic feature that is primarily areal. The languages surveyed in this paper include Bukharan Tajik, Chinese, English, German, Kazakh, Korean, Manchu, Mongolian, Persian, Qarakhanid Turkic, Tatar, Tatar in Xinjiang, Turkish, Tuvan, Uyghur, Uzbek, and Uzbek in Xinjiang.