The aim of this blog is to serve as a meeting point to those who study or have studied English philology and, more broadly, to all those who love literature and language.

6 May 2009

REDUPLICATED EXPRESSIONS

When reading about this week’s phrase, la-di-da, I’ve followed the link to reduplicated expressions, i.e. those which are usually made up of two words, “one that supplies the meaning and a secondary rhyming word, which is added for emphasis”.

According to the kind of sound repetition, these expressions are categorised in three groups: rhyming (e.g. willy-nilly), exact (e.g. chop-chop), and ablaut, that is, when there happens a vowel alternation (e.g. knick-knack).

Chop-chop!


A funny poem using quite a lot of reduplicated expressions can be read in this blog entry.



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