Here’s a fantastic summary of “Contrastive focus reduplication in English (the Salad-Salad paper)”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 22(2) 2004, written by Jila Ghomeshi, Ray Jackendoff, Nicole Rosen, and Kevin Russell. “Reduplication” is the doubling-up of words in speech and prose for rhetorical effect (“I don’t want tuna salad, I want salad salad!”).
This paper presents a phenomenon of colloquial English that we call Contrastive Reduplication (CR), involving the copying of words and sometimes phrases as in ‘It’s tuna salad, not SALAD-salad’, or ‘Do you LIKE-HIM-like him?’ Drawing on a corpus of examples gathered from natural speech, written texts, and television scripts, we show that CR restricts the interpretation of the copied element to a ‘real’ or prototypical reading. Turning to the structural properties of the construction, we show that CR is unusual among reduplication phenomena in that whole idioms can be copied, object pronouns are often copied (as in the second example above), and inflectional morphology need not be copied. Thus the ‘scope’ of CR cannot be defined in purely phonological terms; rather, a combination of phonological, morphosyntactic, syntactic, and lexical factors is involved.
Contrastive reduplication: the Salad-Salad paper and the ooglie-booglies of English