Attack of the Clones

The reason is standard. I recently turned on the TV, and there... And there was an interview with actor Oleg Menshikov. And so they asked him why the film “Burnt by the Sun 2” did not win at the Cannes Film Festival. And he said, “Well, that’s politics.” And then, realizing that, given the personality of the director, he might be misunderstood, he clarified: “Well, not politics, politics, but.” And further about the fact that the festival, naturally, has its own guidelines, priorities, etc.

Hearing this politician-politician, I immediately remembered a funny report that I listened to at the end of May of this year at the annual “Dialogue” conference. Here, perhaps, it is worth making a small digression. The international conference “Dialogue” has been held for more than 30 years. It grew out of a seminar of the same name held in the USSR in the 70s. Its peculiarity is its focus on the practical application of linguistic research.

The “Dialogue” ( www.dialog-21.ru ) brings together both linguists themselves and specialists in computer linguistics, automatic text processing, communication, knowledge representation, automatic translation, electronic text corpora, etc. It can be interesting there. This year, “Dialogue” was painted in sad tones: shortly before the conference, the founder and permanent chairman of the “Dialogue” Program Committee, one of the pioneers of computer linguistics and artificial intelligence research in our country, Alexander Semenovich Narignani, died. He was a true enthusiast of science, sincerely interested in everything new and had a touching belief in progress.

But I return to the report of the young linguist K. Gilyarova “Such a girl-girl. Semantics of reduplication of nouns in Russian colloquial speech and the language of the Internet.” Indeed, recently designs like this girl-girl type have been extremely popular. I can say so myself. Here is another funny example from the same report: In the cinema, Andrei Sergeevich is not at all the same as in the theater, because there he is already a master-master (A. Domogarov about Andrei Konchalovsky in the program “Dithyramb” on “Echo of Moscow”).

This is what the report is about. Let's look at two examples:

Sol arrives there too, they rent a motel room and... love, love, love. [Nina Katerli. Diary of a Broken Doll // “Star”, 2001]. If they have such love-love at 14, let them get married.

Obviously these are completely different things. In the second example, the doubled noun is pronounced without a pause and represents a complete prosodic unit, while in the first, trivial one, a comma indicates the presence of a pause. Naturally, examples of the second type are considered. In general, nouns in the Russian language are characterized by divergent doubling, often with the replacement of the initial consonant of the first component with a labial consonant as part of the second component: tary-bari, figli-migli, hocus-pocus, humpty-dumpty, shura-mury, dance-shmantsy, master-lomaster, passion-face, grass-ant, goat-dereza, etc. Typical formations with the prefixes: Muscovite-Razmoskvich, academician-re-academician.

By the way, at the “Dialogue” another report mentioned another model that is often found in colloquial speech: Oblom Oblomych. She also doesn't seem to be that new. In any case, the artist V. Serov called the “duty” works like this: “Portrait of Portretych.” As for complete reduplication of nouns, until recently there was little of it in the Russian language. Everyone, of course, remembers the joke about horror, horror, but this case is special. That is precisely why he was funny, because such a phenomenon practically did not exist. Only a few specific designs were known, such as the Fool-Fool, and not more foolish than others; He's crazy, crazy, and doesn't eat soap (here it's not just a repetition of a word, but a syntactic construction like X-X, but...). Or there’s the folklore Kolobok-Kolobok, I’ll eat you (only as part of an address and stylistically limited).

But in other European languages ​​(English, French, Italian, Spanish), repetition of nouns, which is also called lexical cloning, arose some time ago. Here are Italian examples:

Siamo amici-amici? -Are we friends?

Abiti a Mosca-Mosca? — Do you live in Moscow-Moscow? (not in the suburbs).

Lexical cloning has different functions. It can be used, for example, to indicate proximity to a prototype:

Did you just have a wedding, or did you limit yourself to registration and a narrow family circle?

It is completely clear what is meant here: a typical wedding in our culture involves a white dress, a limousine, champagne, wedding rings, and a magnificent feast with guests. Everyone will understand what mom-mom, work-work, or Moscow-Moscow is.

There is a well-known mechanism at work here. Various kinds of tautologies in language are often very meaningful. It would seem, what meaning can there be in the expressions Life is life, Children are children, Work is work, if they only state that the object is equal to itself? However, in reality, these phrases say that one should come to terms with the unpleasant aspects of the object, because they are inherent in it from the very beginning and cannot be changed in any way.

But what these unpleasant sides are is very interesting. Here the tautological construction reveals in the word that falls into it some very important elements of meaning and connotation, which, in all likelihood, do not end up in dictionaries, but are assigned to the word in the language. Thus, the phrase Children are children may imply that children are noisy, sometimes selfish and ungrateful, but it is unlikely to be understood in the sense that children require great expenses for their education.

In other cases, “clone” means something like “exactly, actually, literally, exactly”:

Does anyone know of a ski instructor in Kyiv? Not necessarily a direct instructor-instructor, but that the person himself skates well and technically + knows how to tell and show.

Well, not just school-school - so far only three lessons on Saturdays.

It is precisely in this sense that Menshikov said not politics, politics. That is, not literally politics, not politics in the proper sense of the word.

There are also cases of using repetition of nouns to indicate the intensity or degree of a sign (happiness-happiness, rain-rain). This is completely understandable and predictable. It’s just that earlier in the Russian language adjectives and adverbs were used in this way (big-big, blue-blue, quickly-quickly), sometimes verbs (you work, you work), but now nouns have also caught up. Repetitions can also indicate high quality: legs-legs, film-film, song-song - in the sense of long legs, a good film, a soulful song.

Another interesting case is the doubling of nouns as a definite article:

— Here I am with Sasha (in the photo). - Well, which one is Sasha-Sasha? (that is, the same Sasha, the Sasha).

What we do not have and do not foresee is the use of reduplication to express the meaning of the plural, as, for example, in the Malay language: orang - “person”, orangorang - “people”. Well, okay.