Abstract
In this paper I aim to give a brief overview of different types of total reduplication in Modern Japanese. I offer a number of examples based on primary language data from a large-scale web corpus. Some of these examples are frequently treated as total reduplication in the pertinent literature, while others have gained little or no attention in this context so far. In order to address whether these different examples constitute legitimate instances of reduplication, I examine their formal, functional, and semantic properties, as well as their productivity. Numerous phenomena in Modern Japanese formally and functionally fulfill the criteria of qualifying as total reduplication. However, many of these seem to exhibit limited or no potential for morphological innovation. Examples involving phrasal bases support the observation that total reduplication is not necessarily confined to the word-level. Furthermore, I argue that a constructional analysis of different types of reduplication seems highly promising.
