Chinese Reduplication

[petsohp]

 When it comes to chinese grammar, I have always thanked the gods that gauding the rules are generally straight forward. But theres a thing that has come to my attention, and its what google calls 'reduplications'. From personal research, I have found the conclusion why this rule is making my head spin: It is a certificate fact that the complexity of grammitcal 'reduplication' is not found in the languages I speak, english and spanish. (https://wals.info/feature/27A#2/28.3/149.1)

In many cases, I've concluded that I need to first expand my knowledge of characters to actually get into the details of 'reduplication', but every once in a while, I get stumped in a  direct why is this meaning getting reduplicated? 

So just for fun: anyone has any reduplicates examples that they think aren't grasped after knowing the meaning of the characters?

Comments

[grayswandir]

Thank you for sharing the link! I didn't actually know about the [adjective reduplication + 的] structure meaning "pleasantly [adjective]," and I ended up learning some new things about Mandarin vs. Cantonese usage after looking into it more just now. (It turns out AA的 and AA地 are different forms with different meanings, used in different languages. XD Mandarin has AA的, which means "pleasantly [adjective]," whereas Cantonese has AA地, which means "a little bit [adjective]." I hear AA地 all the time but will need to keep in mind that AA的 is not the same thing!)

anyone has any reduplicates examples that they think aren't grasped after knowing the meaning of the characters?

Hmm. I was thinking there were a lot of cases of where an AABB reduplicated form was a completely new word with its own meaning (not similar to the meaning of the two-syllable form), but after browsing around a bit for examples, I'm getting the impression that non-Mandarin dialects do this (completely changing the meaning of the word when it's reduplicated) a lot more than Mandarin does.

In Mandarin, maybe 多多少少 could be an example, since 多少 is a question word meaning "how much/how many?" but 多多少少 means "more or less." Actually, I think the meaning of 多多少少 is easier to understand than 多少 based on just the characters alone! But I don't feel like knowing 多少 (as a question word) is helpful for understanding 多多少少.

Another example might be 原原本本, where 原本 means "originally" but 原原本本 means "from beginning to end; in its entirety."

(The first Cantonese example that came to my mind was 神神化化, where 神化 means "to become a god," but 神神化化 means "not quite right in the head; a bit odd." I find this one interesting because of the way the etymology seems presumably similar to the dated/archaic use of "touched" in English to mean "not quite right in the head," where the implication was that the person had been "touched/influenced" by God/a god/spirits/demons etc.)