1283: Reduplication of Verbs (LITW 4) Jun 15, 2018

The headline "Sessions ‘Hate, Hate, Hates’ Kushner’s Prison Reform Plan, Pardon Push" makes use of what's called emphatic reduplication regarding the word 'hate'. Moreover, because English has very little inflectional morphology, such as the '-s' ending on 3rd person verbs, in the childly question "Do you like him, or do you like like him", it is unclear whether the verb is being doubly conjugated, or indeed has no conjugation, as happens in small clauses. This headline, which uses the verb in the 3rd person, answers this question. Indeed, it shows not only is the verb only conjugated once, but that unlike in phrases like 'fancy-schmancy', with the verb, the original stays at the end, and not the beginning. This is the third part in a new segment called Linguistics in the Wild (LITW), and you can see the rest here.