Reduplication
What it is
- Reduplication: derivational morphological process by which some or all of a word is copied; signifying plurality, repetition, intensity, augmentative, diminutive, etc.
- Swahili verb reduplication: verb stem (including derivational suffix(es)) and suffix are copied, signifying repetition or intensification
- ninasema 'I speak'; nilisemasema 'I speak repeatedly'
- ninasemesha 'I cause to speak';
ninasemeshasemesha 'I repeatedly cause to speak'
- sisemi 'I don't speak'; sisemisemi 'I don't speak repeatedly'
The problem
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If the portion of a word is small and of fixed length, it is possible to build all possible combinations of characters into the FSTs (Koskenniemi, Antworth).
- Tagalog partial stem reduplication ("contemplative actor focus"): pili → pipili;
kuha → kukuha
- pili
[+CAF] → REpili → pipili
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If the reduplicated portion of the word is of variable length, it may be impossible (or very costly) to encode all possible reduplications into FSTs.
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Xerox (Beesley and Karttunen) solution: "compile-and-replace": a high-level FST replaces an abstract characterization of reduplication (upper level) with a regular expression (lower level), which is compiled into an FST at runtime
[stem=sem, tns=pres, sbj=[prs=1, num=plur], obj=none, +iter]
→ n i n a [ { s e m a } ^ 2 ]
→ n i n a s e m a s e m a-
