The Employment of Reduplicative Expressions in American Presidential Debates
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31185/eduj.Vol65.Iss1.5202Keywords:
Reduplication, Ablaut Reduplication, Rhyming Reduplication, Political Discourse.Abstract
Reduplication is an extra-grammatical morphological process, and this study looks at how it is used in American election debates held in 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024. Political discourse has attracted considerable attention from rhetorical and communicative perspectives, but reduplication within this particular register has received comparatively little. The study sets out to examine how reduplication works in political debates to convey contextual and evaluative meaning, with three specific aims: (1) to determine the frequency and structural distribution of reduplicative expressions in American Presidential Debates, (2) to identify the rhetorical functions these expressions perform, and (3) to assess what a combined qualitative and quantitative approach adds to this kind of analysis. Merlini Barbaresi's (2005) model is adopted as the analytical framework. The corpus comprises 1,457,701 words drawn from American presidential debate transcripts spanning 2012 to 2024, and the study is carried out using a mixed quantitative and qualitative methodology. Taken together, the results point to phonological form, semantic coding, pragmatic context, and discourse setting all working in tandem to constrain lexical choice in formal political discourse. The implications reach beyond reduplication itself, feeding into a broader understanding of how vocabulary operates in specialized, high-stakes communication.
Downloads
References
Areef Al-Saeedi, H. M. (2017). The Function of Repetition in Trump’s Inaugural Address A discourse analysis study. Journal of College of Education, 1(28), 709-732. https://doi.org/10.31185/eduj.Vol1.Iss28.34
Bloch, B., & Trager, G. L. (1942). Outline of linguistic analysis. Linguistic Society of America.
Charteris-Black, J. (2014). Analysing political speeches: Rhetoric, discourse and metaphor. Palgrave Macmillan.
Dienhart, J. (1999). Stress in reduplicative compounds. Journal of English Linguistics, 27(3), 197–214.
Dressler, W. U., & Merlini Barbaresi, L. (1994). Morphopragmatics: Diminutives and intensifiers in Italian, German, and other languages. Mouton de Gruyter.
Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and power (2nd ed.). Longman.
Hernández-Guerra, C. (2014). Textual, intertextual and rhetorical features in political discourse. European Scientific Journal, 10(28), 1–18.
Jespersen, O. (1909). A modern English grammar on historical principles. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
Jespersen, O. (1942). A modern English grammar on historical principles (Part VI). Copenhagen: Munksgaard.
Kołłątaj, W. (2016). Reduplication in English: A typological perspective. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Merlini Barbaresi, L. (2008). Extra-grammatical morphology in English: Abbreviations, blends, reduplicatives, and related phenomena. Mouton de Gruyter.
Minkova, D. (2002). Ablaut reduplication in English: The role of phonology. In D. Minkova & R. Stockwell (Eds.), Studies in the history of the English language (pp. 133–160). Mouton de Gruyter.
Okamura, S. (1996). Reduplication in English word-formation. Linguistic Review, 13(2), 173–200.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Longman.
Sapir, E. (1921). Language: An introduction to the study of speech. Harcourt, Brace & Company.
Sapir, E. (1929). A study in phonetic symbolism. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12(3), 225–239.
Sayyora, I. J. & Abdukarimovich, M. T. The role of repetition as a stylistic tool in political texts. (2022). Zien Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 13, 64-65. https://zienjournals.com/index.php/zjssh/article/view/2573
Thun, N. (1963). Reduplicative words in English. Studia Neophilologica, 35, 1–16.
van Dijk, T. A. (1997). Discourse as social interaction. Sage Publications.
van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Politics, ideology, and discourse. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language & linguistics (2nd ed.). Elsevier.
Wodak, R. (2009). The discourse of politics in action: Politics as usual. Palgrave Macmillan.
Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (2016). Methods of critical discourse studies (3rd ed.). Sage Publications.
Zwicky, A. M., & Pullum, G. K. (1987). Plain morphology and expressive morphology. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 13, 330–340.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 م.م. نورا عبد النبي خليف داخل
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
