Assignment 2

Your assignment does not need to be long (one to two pages is perfectly fine), and you do not need to use full sentences etc., bullet points are fine. If you cite any works (which is not necessary) or corpora / examples from the internet (which would be very cool but is not absolutely necessary), provide the references/sources. Try to come up with your own examples, each example might be from a different language, etc. If the examples are from languages other than Czech/Slovak, English, German, French, or Spanish, provide English translations please.

One example: In Czech (just like in English – see the "salad-salad paper" if you're interested) you can form new words using reduplication, which is probably not very frequent, but it is used productively. For instance, I have myself used – just like other students – the reduplication of doma or domů 'home, at home': something like jdeš domů nebo domů domů 'are you going home or home home' might mean 'you mean you are going home, as in to the dorm, or home, as in out of Prague, to your parents' house?'. On the internet, one can find further examples, e.g. absolutní tmou-tmou 'absolute darkness-darkness'. I think this is a problem for the morpheme-based theory, because if one wants to describe the "rule" for creating these words, it is not really possible because there is no constant affix or anything like it.