할하 몽골어의 메아리중첩

Echo Reduplication in Khalkha Mongolian

Khalkha Mongolian has three different reduplication processes: partial reduplication, total reduplication and echo reduplication. This paper describes phonological and morphological properties of echo reduplication in Khalkha Mongolian. Echo reduplication in Khalkha Mongolian copies the base and inserts one of the fixed consonants /m, z, s, š, t/ into the initial onset position of the reduplicative morpheme, expressing ‘X (the base) and the like’. The consonant /m/ is the most common candidate as a fixed consonant. Since echo reduplication avoids having the same phonological string in the base and the reduplicant, the reduplicant does not choose a consonant which appears in the initial onset position of the base. Depending on the base, the reduplicative morpheme can have more than one candidate as a fixed consonant, which can result in multiple echo reduplication forms for a base. This is the most productive among the three Mongolian reduplications. It applies to nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. When a verb is echo-reduplicated in Mongolian, the base and the reduplicative morpheme are always linked by the connective suffix -j, which is attached to the base. Khalkha Mongolian exhibits stem-initial onset simplification in some loanwords. Stem-initial consonant clusters may be reduced into a single fixed consonant in the reduplicative morpheme. While stem-initial consonant clusters like /st, sk, sp/ are always simplified, being replaced by a fixed consonant, clusters like /gl, kl, kr, kn, pr, sl, tr/ may or may not be simplified. Either the clusters can be replaced as a whole by a fixed consonant or only the first consonant of them can be replaced. Khalkha Mongolian echo reduplication may simplify the light diphthong of the first nucleus of the stem, dropping its first element, though it does not change a long vowel or a heavy diphthong in the reduplicative morpheme. When echo reduplication is applied to a verb or noun in Khalkha Mongolian, it copies derivational affixes in the base but not inflectional affixes. In this sense, we argue that echo reduplication in Mongolian is not word or root reduplication, but stem reduplication.