The chapter focuses on two sets of items with hypocoristic function in Hungarian: 1. so-called embellished clippings, i.e. truncations that are subsequently furnished with one of the diminutive/endearment suffixes, such as Feri (Ferenc), Zoli/Zotya/Zotyi/Zolesz/Zolcso/Zoló (Zoltán), Kata/Kati/Kató (Katalin); 2. reduplications, typically consisting of two identical CV syllables. These can be based on first names, surnames, or some common nouns referring to people, denoting kinship relationships, profession, or property, e.g., Zozó (Zoltán), Zsozsó (Zsófia), Kokó (Kovács). Except for reduplications that are based on surnames, for all the others there is also at least one parallel hypocoristic form of the former type, i.e. an embellished clipping: Zoli/Zotya/Zotyi/Zolesz/Zolcso/Zoló – Zozó (Zoltán); Zsófi/Zsóca – Zsozsó (Zsófia). The goal of this chapter is to document the range of possibilities as well as to try to account for this peculiar distribution in the sense of which morphological processes interact with each other and in which order, but also in the sense of suggesting the factors that may have facilitated this state of affairs.

The chapter provides a general overview of lexical reduplication in Finno-Ugric languages. The research data are taken from observations of everyday life and from various written sources for major languages of this family: Finnic (Finnish, Estonian), Saamic, Mordvinic (Erzya, Moksha), Mari, Permic (Komi, Udmurt), Ugric (Hungarian, Mansi, Khanty). Finno-Ugric reduplication is rich, because, on one hand, agglutinative properties of these languages favor mergeability and repetition of various stems; on the other hand, many onomatopoeias and descriptive words (ideophones) can function as various parts of speech, mainly as adverbs and adjectives, which are often repeated. They also sometimes complete nouns or verbs. Repetitive constructions can express various semantic shades, mainly intensification, iterativity, distributivity, multiplicity, frequency, or indefiniteness. Finno-Ugric reduplication is total or partial (which is more frequent). Reduplicative tendencies are more visible and productive in Hungarian, Komi, Udmurt, and Mari, than in Saamic, in which they barely exist.

This chapter surveys various types of reduplicative word formation in German and discusses their morpho-phonological regularities as well as their use conditions and the iconically-expressive meanings attributed to them. It is argued that the repetitive, formally redundant forms pose strict conditions on their use, making reduplication prone to familiar and non-standard language use. At the same time, reduplications are phonologically conspicuous markers for expressive meaning dimensions. Reduplication in German especially evokes semantic flavours related to smallness, playfulness, lack of seriousness, and jocular depreciation. The survey suggests that, in spite of the foregrounding of the expressive and poetic function, the various types of reduplication are morphologically quite regular. Previous accounts on reduplication in German that deem these words to be “extra-grammatical” are therefore rejected.

The aim of this study is to investigate aspects of expressivity in Standard Modern Greek (hereafter SMG), specifically cases in which expressivity shares the characteristic [+negative] or pejorative, in the more technical sense adopted here. Our research is focused on the level of morphology, particularly on productive word formation, both through compounding (first compound constituents with pejorative meaning, as in vromokánalo ‘filthy TV channel’ and paʎoiós ‘old/damn virus’, among others) and derivation (derivational suffixes with pejorative functions, such as ipurʝéi ‘bad ministers’, ipalilákos ‘insignificant clerk’ and fititarjó ‘a student lot’, among others). It should be noted that although the particular SMG morphological phenomena/devices have been scatteringly studied in earlier Greek literature, negative expressive meaning, that is, pejoration, has not been systematically dealt with so far.

The chapter analyses a small corpus of twelve Catalan folk tales voice-dramatised and radio broadcast in Majorca in 1959. Most of the lexical material studied here is elicited from the same source and from Diccionari Català-Valencià-Balear, a master work of 20th-century romance lexicography. The expressive resources used in the recordings can be analysed as actual resources in the language for they are shared by both speakers and listeners and they successfully convey a part of the meaning. Along with voice-attached resources as pitch, intensity, or speech rate, other more conventional means such as those preserved in writing (morphological, lexical, syntactic) are also analysed. The findings by Dingemanse and Akita (2017) on the (inverse) relation between expressiveness and grammatical integration are used. The chapter demonstrates the degree to which expressives can be marked by means of phonetic cues in Catalan, initially setting the border between ideophones and unconventional spoken iconicity. By comparing oral and written versions of the same tales it is proposed that fixability by writing is a good test of grammatical integration, at least a necessary condition.

Expressive and ideophonic constructions conveying ‘marked words that depict sensory imagery’ (Dingemanse 2012) are frequently found in the languages of all regions of the world, but their distribution, use and functioning across languages of the Caucasus has never been documented from a regional perspective. This chapter surveys the various kinds of expressive language present in the three autochthonous Caucasian families: Abkhaz-Adyghean, Kartvelian, and Nakh-Daghestanian. It also looks in depth at the specific morphological and syntactic peculiarities of expressives in Georgian, which exhibit exuberant consonant clusters, processes of reduplication uncharacteristic of the language as a whole, as well as specific morphosyntactic alignment splits between different classes of expressive. Expressives will be seen not to be one thing, but many.

The chapter surveys repetitions and reduplications in Italian, from the segmental to the discourse level. Italian has reduplicative structures in ideophones, onomatopoeic formations, child language, and baby talk; segment repetition is used as an expressive device in commercials and product names; reduplication is used as a lexeme formation device in Verb-Verb compounds such as fuggifuggi ‘stampede, lit. run away run away’, and as a means of intensification of adjectives and adverbs; some sequences of two nouns have lexicalized with adjectival or adverbial meaning; contrastive focus reduplication is also attested in Italian. Discourse markers are often reduplicated; several cases of repetition of imperatives in discourse have constructionalized, giving rise to converbs with concessive or hypothetical meanings or used as antecedents of consecutive clauses; noun reiteration in discourse can be used to indicate frequency of occurrence of entities and events. It is argued that no clear dividing line can be drawn between pragmatic or syntactic repetition and grammatical or morphological reduplication, since grammaticalization of discourse repetition in diachrony often occurs.