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There are a few phrases myself and others around me will use to change the meaning. The first example is “out”:

Shall we go out? — meaning “Shall we go to the pub?”

vs

Shall we go out out? — meaning “Shall we go to a club?”

And my second example is “home”:

“I’m going home later” — meaning “I’m going back to where I live when at university”

vs

“I’m going home home later” — meaning “I’m going back to where I live when not at uni, (probably my parents’).”

I’m curious if this usage of repeating a word to express different levels of the same thing has a name?

This question is different from What is the term for the double consecutive use of a word with stress on one of the words to alter its severity? - here, there is no emphasis on the second word - in fact normally I think the emphasis is on the first word!

Tim
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  • I can’t think of any other examples right now but I’m certain there are others. Perhaps “I’ve got work” meaning “I’ve got school work” vs “I’ve got work work” meaning “I’ve got to do work for a part time job”. – Tim Aug 19 '19 at 12:24
  • Now that I've actually looked at the linked question, this is pretty clearly a duplicate -- can you explain why you think the answer there (which I have also given here) does not apply? – Lucas Y. Aug 19 '19 at 12:38
  • @LucasY. Sorry, I read it as being stress on the second word. You’re right, it’s a duplicate. Probably sensible to remove your duplicated answer – Tim Aug 19 '19 at 12:43
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    Possible duplicate of Is there a word for using a word twice to imply something different?: ' reduplication.

    De Gruyter says that it is artificial to try to distinguish intensification ('a little, little grave') and attestation to the genuineness / prototypicality of an article ('coffee coffee'; 'the Woman woman' [from 'Sherlock']) so this word [reduplication] covers both cases. A little, little grave is a truly little grave; coffee coffee is the real thing.

     – Edwin Ashworth Aug 19 '19 at 12:52
  • @Tim Can't you instead delete the question? – Edwin Ashworth Aug 19 '19 at 13:10

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This is known as contrastive focus reduplication.

In linguistic terms, this kind of repetition is called reduplication. Reduplication is when a word, an element of a word, or a phrase is repeated. This can often result in change of meaning or tone. It happens in many languages, not just English, and there are many types of reduplication. There’s rhyming reduplication (razzle-dazzle, hoity-toity), exact reduplication (bye-bye, din-din), ablaut reduplication (ding-dong, zig-zag), and shm-reduplication (baby-shmaby, fancy-schmancy).

LIKE–like, as seen above, is an example of contrastive focus reduplication (sometimes also called lexical cloning or the double construction).

This Dictionary.com article has more examples and a link to the foundational paper on this topic (the "Salad-Salad" paper).

Community
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Lucas Y.
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