Part of
Constructions in SpanishEdited by Inga Hennecke and Evelyn Wiesinger
[Constructional Approaches to Language 34] 2023
► pp. 57–76
The aim of the article is to analyse the mechanism of lexical reduplication in two Romance languages: Spanish and Italian. Since the study is based on a constructional approach, the repetition of a lexical unit within one phrase is considered to form a construction that presents some specific semantic and pragmatic meanings. Based on the examples from oral corpora of Spanish and Italian, the article presents a pragmatic interpretation of reduplicative constructions. Although Spanish and Italian lexical reduplications seem to share a range of characteristics, the study also focuses on meanings and interactive functions that differentiate these two languages.