Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The meanings expressed by reduplication, or linguistic doubling, are similar across a wide array of languages. Interestingly, some of these shared meanings do not concern doubling, repetition, or plurality. This non-arbitrariness of the sign may be attributable to the interplay of two forces: iconicity, and conceptually-based semantic extension. Cross-linguistic evidence supporting this account is presented. More generally, this paper argues that the interaction of iconicity and semantic extension constitutes a potentially powerful source of nonarbitrariness in the mapping between sound and meaning.