I have a difficult problem with the technical term “reduplication” as the prefix “re-“ is a disturbing tautology and I think only “duplication” is enough for describing it as a morphological process (though, I do not know whether it is one of the morphological processes or a simple lexical item. What is it? This question was raised by Rajendra Singh). I will be obliged, if the linguist community would kindly allow me to use “duplication” instead of dubious “reduplication” in case of XX lexical items.
Secondly, within the domain of “duplication”, sometimes “onomatopoeia” has got the iconic status as if signifiers and signified are “fully” analogous. What’s about the “relative degree of arbitrariness” in case of onomatopoeia or any other so-called icons? May we need grammatological intervention in this case? I think, in case of onomatopoeia, the differAnce of degrees of arbitrariness is important.
I am so much concerned with this phenomenon as, when (re-) searching on Bangla, I was surprised to find a large corpus was generated at the end of 19th C and at the beginnings of the 20th C. and still the research on such process/item is going on with the deployment of different types of methodologies. Why were the members of the emerging civil society of a newly imagined state, viz. Bangla, so much concerned about duplication? Was it for the sake of showing something unique in the imagined speech community—something different from the supposed inheritance of the Old Indic language? Were the civil members of Bengali community trying to get out of genealogical fantasy and creating another imagiNATION? This is, of course, a question not related to micro-linguistics.
Reduplication has a broader sense than duplication, viz. the repetition of a linguistic element as is or with a slight change. So "see-saw", "hurley-burley", and "go-go" would all count as reduplication, but only the last would also count as duplication. Admittedly, the terminology invites confusion and is often not used consistently, and the prefix "re-" doesn't have any of its usual senses; it seems more like a dead prefix, e.g. like the "re" of "resemble".
RE: “re-“
This is actually an interesting prefix. The word that once got me exercised was “redouble” where it functions as an intensifier rather than implying “again” (same for “resound”) — except when “redouble” is used as a technical term in bridge for doubling a bid that has already been doubled by an opponent.
You might also consider the different ways that "re" functions in pairs like “recover” / “re-cover”, “restore” / “re-store”, and the like, where the prefix is not detachable in the unhyphenated member without affecting the sense of the root.
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