Reduplication as morphological doubling: Persian evidence

The present study, using some morphological Persian constructions, explores Morphological Doubling Theory (Inkelas and Zoll 2005, henceforth MDT) and its essential claim as regards resulting reduplication when the morphology calls twice for a constituent of a given semantic description. In contrast to the previous theories and approaches categorizing reduplication as phonological duplication, MDT categorizes it generally as reduplication of given morpho- semantic features. To answer the research question and know whether the formation of Persian reduplicated constructions are explainable and justifiable in MDT framework or not, using two categories of semantic and morphotactic evidence, some Persian data are analyzed in MDT framework. Semantic evidence such as root allomorphoy, synonym constructions, echo reduplication, medial full reduplication and antonym constructions together with morphotactic evidence such as ezafe vowel, indifference-ke construction, interfix, linker or enclitic and melodic overwriting are some pieces of used evidence for exploring MDT framework in the studied constructions in Persian. The present study, with a descriptive-analytic method, has been carried out by studying some Persian data gathered through people’s daily natural conversations, written works on Persian morphology and authors’ intuition. Analyzing the gathered data reveals that adopting MDT, in addition to presenting a comprehensive description and analysis of Persian reduplication, makes it possible to describe and study the structure and semantic of the reduplicated constructions that were not appropriately analyzable previously.