Alofi
Using Model-Theoretic Approaches to Uncover Linguistic Organization
Various scholars have proposed the idea that there are different ways for a form-meaning pairing to be iconic, and that these different types of iconicity may interact with one another (Buchler, 1986; Reiger, 1998; Rozhansky, 2015). As a way of formalizing this idea, Lǐ and Ponsford (2018) identify five features pertaining to the form of fully reduplicated words that are in an iconic relationship with some aspect of a meaning that was found to be marked by total reduplication. Based on these formal features, they propose the following five dimensions of iconicity ('iconicities' in Lǐ and Ponsford (2018)) that can be manifested by reduplication patterns: (1) Balinese Pluractional markers keplug'explode' keplug~keplug'explode repeatedly' pa-keplug'X (plural) explode simultaneously' (Arka and Dalrymple, 2017) Notice that the repeated-explosion event is marked by a form that repeats keplug, while the event where all of the explosions happen at once (no repetition) is marked by a form that does not involve any repetition. Viewed through this lens, the Balinese pluractional prefix pa-is not entirely arbitrary, because it highlights the distinction between two types of pluractionality that are marked in Balinese. This is a case of iconicity because a property of the form (repetition or non-repetition) is also a property of the associated meaning. In this paper, we consider pluractional markers in Kaqchikel, Karuk, and Yurok.