English Reduplicative Loans in Bangla

This small-scale exploratory study attempts to trace and taxonomize English reduplicative loans used in Bangla. Reduplicatives are the products of the morphological process known as reduplication i.e. doubling of a word, stem or root. For example, ha ha, dilly dally, hocus pocus etc. Though reduplication interfaces with both Phonology and Morphology, it is customarily included in Morphological Linguistics. The prime purpose of this paper is to detect and classify the morphological products in the form of reduplicative loans to Bangla from the English language. For the detection of loan reduplicatives, lexicographic works have been consulted. Social media sites have also contributed to the corpus of this study. Our corpus reveals that Bangla has two types of English-based reduplicative loans – unchanged and changed. The unchanged category includes onomatopoeic and baby-talk reduplicatives. The members of the changed category, on the other hand, undergo different morphological modifications. There are a few English-based reduplicative loans that have been assimilated into the fabric of Bangla – these are so strongly Banglicized that their English identity is unrecognizable without the help of etymological dictionaries. Apart from this fully integrated small category, there exists another class of loan reduplicatives that has effaced some unalloyed, internally sourceable reduplicatives. A R T I C L E I N F O Paper type: Research Article Article history: Received: 23 April 2019 Revised: 10 August 2019 Accepted: 17 August 2019


Introduction
Reduplication is conventionally treated as a morphological process where a lexeme or root or stem is fully or partially repeated to form a new word.The original word is dubbed as base or reduplicand whereas the repeated word, either unmodified or modified, is labelled as reduplicant.The resultant word produced through this process is called a reduplicative.For example, ha ha, blah blah, hocus pocus, etc.The first two examples are known as 'complete or copy reduplication' while the last one goes by the name of partial reduplication.The newly constructed words based on ha, blah and hocus are baptized as reduplicatives.Now let us have a glimpse at some Bangla examples of reduplication ghorey ghorey, lal lal, poysa-toysa, etc.Like their English counterparts, the first two examples are 'copy reduplication' whereas the last one belongs to the category of partial reduplication.
According to the cross-familial research of Rubino (2016) among 368 languages, 85% show the presence of reduplication.The authenticity of Rubino's work-based claim is attested by Kauffman (2015).He presents some representative examples of cross-familial reduplications in an engaging manner.A bus service in Hawaii is known as Wiki-Wiki (Wiki= Fast) meaning that the service is very fast.Hier-hier in South Africa means right here.A melon in Swahili is tiki while tikitiki refers to a big melon.From America and Africa, let us turn our attention to Asia.In Mandarin, xiao means small whereas the reduplicated form of the word xiao-xiao refers to something very tiny.The English counterpart of the Chinese diminutive is teenie-weenie which means a tiny girl.Bunga in Malay is flower and the pluralized version of the word is bunga-bunga.
Rubino (2016) and Barbaresi (2015) have shown that reduplication is a morphological process with iconicity.This feature is a natural phenomenon and hence unmarked in most of the languages.Though there are some reduplication-free languages, in the words of Kauffman (2015), many languages have inherent reduplication constructs.Speaking on an areal basis, the South Asian languages have the capacity to make copious use of the reduplication process because of the presence of these in-built constructs (Racova, 2012).Bangla, according to Bhattacharya (2016), is remarkably rich in reduplicative words.Tagore (2011) in his discussion on the use of repetition has shown how rich Bangla is in terms of reduplicative resources.
Despite the super-abundance of reduplicatives in Bangla, this word formation device has not received detailed treatment at the hands of the researchers.There are some small-scale researches on reduplication in Bangla but none of the works has shed light on the reduplicative lexemes that Bangla has borrowed from English.
Among the handful works on reduplication in Bangla, Bhattacharya's (2016) research can be considered as a pioneering one.He discusses reduplication in Bangla in the light of the Whole Word Morphology (WWM) approach.In his work, the researcher has made an important distinction among the words in Bangla formed following the process of reduplication and thwpattern of reduplication.
Another work that sheds light on the reduplication process in Bangla is Reduplication in Bengali Language by Rana (2010).This work is an attempt at taxonomization of the reduplication processes used in Bangla.Chevkina (1964) also dwells on reduplication in Bangla even though she employs the term repetition in place of reduplication.As her focus is on pair constructions in the Bangla language, she only discusses about total reduplication in Bangla.Chakravarty and Bandopadhya (2010) have carried out a study to identify reduplication in Bangla corpus.Besides identification, they attempted to analyze the examples from semantic perspective.Racova ( 2012) is an interesting study on reduplication in Bangla.In the work, she focuses on the reduplication of verbal forms in Bangla.
Though Bangla, along with its South Asian peers, makes abundant use of reduplication, studies conducted on this important aspect of expressive morphology are few.Surprisingly, even those few researches on reduplication in Bangla have not touched upon reduplicative loans in Bangla.This exploratory study is aimed at filling the hitherto unnoticed and unaddressed void.We have a substantial body of research literature on English loanwords in Bangla.Yet, none of the works has paid attention even in a peripheral or passing manner to English reduplicative loans in Bangla.This paper is intended to making contribution to this uncharted and unexplored territory of expressive or extragrammatical morphology.

Research Methods
This is an exploratory research based on lexicographic works and researcher-observation.The major segment of data for this work has been culled from Moitree's (2001) work Bideshi Bangla Shobder Obhidhan (Dictionary of Foreign Words in Bangla).Besides, examples have been extracted from literary texts and posts on social media sites.All the works cited and used have been properly acknowledged in the reference section of this paper.Besides lexicographic and literary materials, researcher observation has been amply used in this study.As there is a noticeable paucity of research materials on English reduplicative loans in Bangla, observation of the paper writer has been employed as an important research tool.This tool has been recognized by Weinreich (1963).According to him, the issue of the dearth of previous research materials can be efficiently addressed through the observation of trained linguists and researchers.This is a small-scale exploratory study and hence it is not immune from the shortcomings that typically accompany this type of research.Among the limitations of this paper, first comes the issue of space and time.It is remarkably deficient in the spatial and temporal aspects.Hypothesis formation and drawing of generalizations are difficult from studies that suffer from time and space constraints.Apart from this, the dataset used in this study, even though efforts have been made to render it inclusive and representative, is very small.Last but not the least, the phonological aspect of reduplication has not received any attention from the researcher.

Cross-linguistic taxonomy and functions of reduplication
Based on the studies of Abbi (1992), Singh (2003), Rana (2010), Kauffman (2015) and Bhattacharya (2016), reduplication across languages can be roughly typologized as follows: a. Copy reduplicatives b.Partial reduplicatives c.Ablaut reduplicatives d.Echo reduplicatives e. Baby-talk reduplicatives f.Onomatopoeic reduplicatives g.Name doubling reduplicatives h.Shm-reduplication Cross-linguistically, reduplication serves a good number of important functions.Their functions include both phonological and morphological aspects.In morphology, they range from derivation to inflection.In phonology, reduplication serves as a concomitant element of affixation.The following are the most prominent functions of reduplication identified by linguists from cross-linguistic data (Kauffman, 2015;Abbi,1992;Singh, 2003;Tagore, 2011)

Reduplication in Bangla
Reduplication, as we have already mentioned, has an ambivalent position in linguistics with roots in both the domains of phonology and morphology.Although it interfaces with phonology and morphology, it is traditionally discussed as a word formation process (Jespersen, 1942).Bangla also complies with this conventional compartmentalization of reduplication and hence in this paper it is being treated as a component of morphology.
Bangla, like other South Asian languages, is significantly rich in reduplicatives.Tagore (2011: 48) comments on the reduplicative resources of Bangla, "So far as I have observed, Bangla is richer than other Aryan languages in reduplicatives".Chatterjee (1988) echoes Tagore in his discussion on reduplication in Bangla.
Linguists, grammarians and researchers have taxonomized Bangla reduplicatives from different perspectives.Rana (2010) has pointed out that Bangla has two types of reduplicativesmorphological and lexical.Morphological reduplication refers to the modified or unmodified cloning of the base.Some examples of the morphological reduplicatives are jol tol, gan tan, etc.The lexical reduplicatives, on the other hand, refer to doubled words which despite their binary identical composition are unanalyzable into single meaningful units.Chacha and bulbul are instances of lexical reduplication.
In good conformity with English reduplicatives, Bangla also has copy reduplicatives and partial reduplicatives.Haste haste and chalte chalte are copy reduplicatives while boi toi and chhuti tuti are examples of partial reduplicatives.In Bangla we also have onomatopoeic and echo reduplicatives.Shon shon, bhon bhon, and kolkol belong to the previous category while faltal, billtill, and namfam are members of the latter class.If we summarize, the products of reduplication in Bangla can be classified as follows: a. Copy reduplicatives b.Partial reduplicatives c.Onomatopoeic reduplicatives d.Echo reduplicatives e. Lexical reduplicatives The first four sub-types belong to the broader class of reduplicatives known as morphological reduplicatives.

Functions of reduplication in Bangla
From the classification of reduplicatives in the preceding paragraph, we see that the patterns of doubling in Bangla conform to the global typology of this component of expressive morphology.From the cluster of functions performed by reduplicatives across language families, the following ones are noticeable in Banglaa.Pluralization (Lal lal ful-Many red flowers) b.Frequency (Masey masey -Every month) c.Intensification (Tatka tatka (Tagore, 2011: 49) -Very fresh) d.Augmentativization and Diminutivization (Bochka buchki -Big and small bags) e. Pretension (Chor chor khela (Tagore, 2011: 49) -Playfully pretending as a thief) In addition to these functions, as Chaterjee (1988: 95-97) observes, reduplication in Bangla also expresses intention like Jabo jabo korchhi, Mon bari bari Korey, etc. Tagore (2011: 49) and Majumdar (2016: 80) have illustrated another function of Bangla reduplicativescertainty (Char charpeyada asia hajir/ In came FOUR mercenary musclemen with all their threatening might; Panch panchjon lok accidente mara gelo/ The accident devoured FIVE people).Last but not the least, Tagore (2011) in his classic work on Bangla linguistics titled Shobdototto has dedicated a whole chapter on reduplication (he uses the word 'repetition' in place of 'reduplication') in Bangla.Besides above mentioned functions, according to Tagore, Bangla reduplicatives can also convey senses of hesitation (Jabo jabo and uthhi uthhi), incompleteness (Bhasa bhasa, and kando kando) and mildness (Jor jor and shith shith).

Results and Discussion
In the light of the collected data appended with this paper, let us first see whether the English-based reduplicatives used in Bangla conform to the basic taxonomy of Bangla reduplicatives proposed by Rana (2010).Rana (2010) in his work has shown that Bangla reduplicatives can be divided into two categories: Lexical and morphological.Lexical reduplicatives, as we have already come to know, are words unanalyzable into meaningful smaller units.Bhattacharya (2016: 224) has given some examples of lexical reduplicatives in Bangla suc as Chacha, Lala, Bulbul, etc. Bhattacharya (2016:227) terms these as pattern reduplicatives.According to him, these are not proper reduplicatives.All the reduplicative words catalogued in the data section belong to the category called morphological reduplicatives.
From the examples used in Appendices 1 -6, we can propose yet another classification of English reduplicative loans in Bangla -Unchanged reduplicatives and Changed reduplicatives.Unchanged reduplicatives have entered Bangla without any morphological or phonological changes, for example, Hiss hiss korey sapti choley gelo.Here the English onomatopoeic word hiss has entered Bangla as a single lexeme and through its total reduplication we have got hisshiss.Same is the case with the English word tick (Tick tick korey ghori janan dichchhey somoy thik thik choley jachchhey).Appendix 2 contains some more examples of unchanged reduplicative loans popularly used in Bangla such as hiphip, tata, bye bye.The changed reduplicatives which constitute the bigger segment of loan reduplicatives are morphologically processed.The base is English and the reduplicant is phonologically Bangla.In this way, we have got sublet-gublet, biketike, etc.
Our data attest the presence of an interesting type of loan reduplicative in Bangla (Appendices 1 & 3).Moitree (2001: 117) confirms that the much used Bangla word finfiney is of English origin.The reduplicative owes its existence to the English word fine.Initially, any thin, good cloth was described as fine fine by the Banglophones which ultimately turned into finfiney.Another example belonging to this category is Jandrel jandrel (Appendix 3) which has its origin in the English word general.This type of reduplicative loans can be dubbed as naturalized loan reduplicatives.
The data-set that we have used makes clear that most of the English reduplicative loans in Bangla are partial reduplicatives.The base is English but the reduplicant is Bangla for example, biketaik, fitfat, brand-trand, etc.
Appendix 4 presents some interesting examples of English loan reduplicatives in Bangla.For example, we notice the presence of two variants of reduplicatives based on the English word bill into billtill and billfill.While billtill means bill, commission, etc., billfill connotes negative emotive feelings of the speaker for example, billfiller bishoye ami kichui janina.Think of the famous line from Shamsur Rahman's poem Pandashrama-Meeting holo feeting holo, kun milena tobu.The same negative attitude of the speaker is manifest in this sentence Eto brandfrand diye ki hobey?The shades of appreciative and depreciative semanticity can be traced in the following duos, brandtrand/brandfrand, votetot/votefot, and mediatidia/mediafidia.Tagore (2011: 78) has commented in an arresting manner on the semantic shift that the reduplicative word undergoes when 't' is

Conclusion
Reduplicatives, despite the fluidity of their meanings, are important morphological products because of their iconicity.Albeit semantic indeterminacy, they are a natural phenomenon i.e. unmarked.As reduplicative lexemes are core morphological products performing multiple functions, these words deserve more attention.This attention-deficit is more prominent in case of English reduplicative loans into Bangla.Despite a few works on reduplication in Bangla, not a single work has so far been done on loan reduplicatives in our language.By detecting, collecting and taxonomizing representative samples of the English-based reduplicatives in Bangla, this paper has initiated shedding light on the hitherto ignored aspect of extra-grammatical or expressive morphology.It can be hoped that future researchers will do more spade work to crack the complete code of English reduplicatives in Bangla from an integrated perspective including the trinity of phonology, morphology and pragmatics.