Contrastive Focus Reduplication Redux

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. My name is Debbie Oleg, and I’m in Wisconsin.

Hi, Debbie. Welcome.

Hi, Debbie. We could have told you by the accent.

Yeah, where in Wisconsin?

Near Milwaukee. It’s called Pewaukee.

Okay, yeah, sure. We’ve had callers on from there before.

What’s going on in Pewaukee?

Well, it’s kind of an odd question. I don’t know.

I’m a registered nurse, and I’ve been off work for a while, and I feel that my grammar skills have become somewhat lax.

And some of my friends have kindly chided me about that.

Sometimes I use this double word. How to explain it would be that if I’m swimming with my husband, I’ll say, we’re going to go swim, swim.

And how the question came about was, do other people in the country do this besides some of my other friends?

And is there a history of this occurring elsewhere and where did it originate from?

Because what the second swim means is that you’re sort of emphasizing the word rather than using a better adjective.

That’s kind of it.

So you’re distinguishing that particular event from a different kind of swimming, where you might have a kind of swimming where you go to the pool and you fool around and you splash each other, and technically you’re swimming.

Or you could have the kind of swimming where you’re in the water, doing a stroke, end-to-end, doing laps, right?

And that’s the swimming swimming.

Right.

That’s kind of what I put down was that I was writing a little note here that we’re going to go do laps rather than just go in the warm water pool, let’s say.

Yeah, you’re not the only one.

You’re not.

This is ordinary English.

And actually, this kind of thing happens in other languages as well, including some of the Pacific Island nations, where they’ll take a word and what’s called reduplicate it.

They’ll say it twice to indicate that they mean the canonical, purest, most common, most idealized form of a thing.

The essence, the platonic essence.

Yeah, yeah.

So as a linguist put it, a true real default or prototype instance of it.

So the example that I like to use is Martha might say, you know, we’ll be talking to somebody.

She’ll be like, you know, I really like that guy.

I’ll be like, do you like him or do you like him like him?

I just like him.

The like-like would be, does that mean that she’s feeling romantic towards him and interested and wants to go on a date?

Or does it just mean that she’s like, oh, he’s a good guy or a good person and the sex and gender and romance don’t come into it at all?

So these kinds of things exist throughout English.

We do this all of the time, and it’s very ordinary, and it’s a kind of emphasis in stress.

We do this because stress, what we pronounce with the most force in a word or a sentence or a paragraph, is part of the way that we communicate.

English isn’t a tonal language like Chinese, but we do have in this way, by the words that we punch or hit, as they might say, the words that we put the most oomph behind, we do have a way of indicating what’s important.

Is this something that, because I heard what you said, that it’s sort of common, but I had only started hearing it a few years ago, and then it sort of fades away in our group, and then all of a sudden you’ll start using that term again or repeating the word again?

Again, people chide you for it because it’s not appropriate language.

Oh, really?

They’re wrong.

Yeah, it’s fine.

Debbie, it’s not even, there’s not even a question about this being wrong or right.

It’s completely grammatical, normal English.

Without it, if you didn’t use this kind of English, you would actually find yourself unable to express some things that were very easy to say that way.

Why should you have to say, when I say swimming, what I mean is the kind of swimming where you do laps and you actually do some exercise?

Yeah, it’s very concise.

Yeah, if I can just say, I mean swimming, swimming, why not?

That’s great. That’s great communication. It’s efficient.

Well, I will share that with my friends as well as my husband.

I appreciate the information.

Debbie, thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Take care now. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I forgot to mention what this is called.

The long form of this, and there’s other terms for it, but this is the one that I use.

It’s called contrastive focus reduplication.

It simply means that you are, by using a word twice, emphasizing that you mean the very purest form of a thing.

CFD, Contrastive Focus Reduplication.

Usually just called it reduplication, but it’s a particular kind of reduplication.

CFR.

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