Regular Reduplication Across Modalities
Abstract
Reduplication is a common morphological process of copying, with a wide-ranging typology. Reduplication is among the most computationally complex phenomena in natural language, is difficult for modern machine learning methods to learn (Deletang et al., 2022), and yet is inhabits a highly restricted and structured computational class. However, this restrictiveness is mostly known based on spoken language typology, when reduplication is far more ubiquitous, expressive, and varied in signed languages. Here we consider signed reduplication, and analyze a unique type of ‘embedded’ reduplication which may require supra-regular computation. We show that in fact it is still regular, further evidence that reduplication is regular across modalities. We discuss some lingering issues related to reduplicative computation across speech and sign
