The topic of the article is lexical cloning in English. Lexical cloning, also known as ‘contrastive focus reduplicationʼ, is a word formation process that can be defined as a modifier reduplication of a lexical expression, whose function is to emphasize the unambiguous sense of a lexeme. Although a lexical clone specifies the prototypical denotation of the repeated item, it has also been noticed that lexical clones depend on the context of use. Therefore, lexical cloning can be analysed as a morphological, lexicosemantic and lexicopragmatic phenomenon. The article discusses examples of lexical cloning with adjectives taken from conversational English. Moreover, the article addresses lexical adjustment and motivated redundancy, the pragmatic processes that can shed light on how the doubling of the lexeme occurs. The analysis of the examples leads to the conclusion that prototype specification is not the core function of lexical cloning. Instead, lexical cloning can be viewed as the speaker’s strategy to avoid possible misinterpretation and misunderstanding, and in that sense, it can also be viewed as the speaker’s strategy to minimize the interpreter’s processing effort.