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영어

Reduplication is a type of morphological word formation process in which the actual shape is heavily dependent upon the root or stem to which it applies. The reduplicated construction of the world languages shares an array of meanings which recur so frequently in so many languages: plural, emphasis, continuity, plurality etc. We can explain this phenomenon by the sound symbolic characteristics of the reduplication, which means that they have iconically motivated concepts, a direct match between form and meaning. The iconic characteristics of the reduplicated words can be divided into quantity and quality. The meaning ‘plurality’ comes from the former and ‘child’ from the latter. And the various analogous meanings of reduplicated words are due to their semantic extension from this sound symbolic interpretations. The relation of meaning and the types of reduplication is not consistent among languages of the world.