The typology and semantics of complex nominal duplication in Ewe

Different kinds of repetition occur in grammar and discourse cross-linguistically. Yet, many descriptions present the different processes of repetition as if they were the same. This article demonstrates the inadequacy of such an approach using data from Ewe and other West African languages. It argues that formally and functionally, Ewe makes a distinction between reduplication, triplication, syntactic iteration, clausal repetition, and complex nominal duplication. The article focuses mainly on the hitherto unsystematically described complex nominal duplicative constructions, their structural types (the juxtaposed and the morphologically linked), and their semantic types (the temporal, the distributive, the additive, the possessive superlative, the iterative numeral, and the deprecatory). The semantics of the deprecatory construction type and the manner in which repetitive structure, connectives, and other morphological marking all combine to produce the deprecatory interpretation are described from a crosslinguistic perspective.