Hindi Overlapping Study

Reduplication is a significant grammatical tool and it is widely used in many languages. This thesis is devoted to the studies of the reduplications in Hindi language with their various types, semantic functions and pragmatic values. At the end of this text reduplication’s motivations are discussed. The whole work falls into five chapters.Chapter 1 is an introduction. This chapter reviews the definition and the previous typological researches concerning the functions of reduplications of Hindi, and makes a brief introduction of the theories used in this research. Chapter 2 investigates the various types and functions of reduplications in Hindi(complete reduplication, partial reduplication, and mimic words), and each function is exemplified with data from Hindi language. Chapter 3 focuses on the analysis of reduplication’s structure and functions in Hindi. Based on the rather detailed investigation, some generalizations about reduplications are raised: the first is the cross-categoriality of the reduplication; the second is the universal tendency among the use of reduplications to express the categories of number, property and aspect; the third is the quantification is the core of reduplications to express the categories of number, property and aspect. Some reduplications’ characteristic or property has been changed, and get the new functions in the sentence. Chapter 4 mainly discusses the motivations of reduplications in Hindi. Chapter 5 is about the pragmatic values of reduplications in Hindi. At the end of the thesis a general conclusion has been made, and it points out the issues needing further explorations.