• prenasalized stops and affricates
• VOS
• rich verbal morphology
Reduplication Form-Function
distinction of full and partial reduplication depends on the stress pattern so that either one, two or three syllables are copied according to final, penultimate or antepenultimate main stress (cf. Keenan & Polinsky 2001: 573):
• diminution, pluralization, lexical enrichment
concerning form there are also a few special patterns of reduplication, including fixed segmentism (k- in some vowel-initial reduplicants), stress clash in a number of two-syllable words and optional or blocked vowel elision with bisyllabic vowel-initial penultimately stressed reduplicants (cf. Keenan & Polinsky 2001: 573)
Relationship Form-Function
various forms - various functions
Reduplication System
• category-preserving and applying mainly to roots, most commonly adjectival and verbal (cf. Keenan & Polinsky 2001: 570-571)
• Malagasy shows an array of morphophonemic alternations in reduplication (see Rasoloson & Rubino 2005: 461-462)
• rule ordering: active voice, passive voice, reciprocal and circumstantial morphology all apply after reduplication (cf. Keenan & Polinsky 2001: 484; 605; 612) while there is considerable variation in rule ordering concerning reduplication and aN- prefixation as well as in combination with tense marking (see Keenan & Polinsky 2001: 597-598)
• there is no reduplication on reduplication (including frozen reduplications) and bare numerals, in the latter case a combination of reduplication and a prefix probably having preempted the bare reduplication (cf. Keenan & Polinsky 2001: 573)
Terminology