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The topic of reduplication in Sinitic languages has attracted much attention in the literature, but studies adopting a comparative and areal perspective are still lacking. This paper aims to analyse the correlations between form and function in reduplicating constructions in a sample of twenty Sinitic languages, representing eight branches of the family, comparing them to a set of fourteen non-Sinitic languages of the East- and Southeast Asian area. We will show that the various semantic nuances conveyed by reduplicated verbs could be argued to derive from the core meaning of verbal reduplication as iteration of an event, either over a bounded or an unbounded timespan. On the structural level, a pervasive feature of reduplication lies in its compliance to strict requirements on the morphological makeup of the base. This holds especially in the case of the reduplication of disyllabic and bimorphemic verbs with increasing semantics, a consistent pattern across our sample.

In this paper we discuss two cases of seemingly polysemous derivational affixes: the Ewe suffix -ví, originally a noun meaning “child”, which has acquired a number of different semantic values in word formation, as e.g. “inexperienced” (núfíáláví “inexperienced teacher”) or “person who adheres to the typical behaviour of a group” (amredzóví “someone who behaves like a foreigner”, and the Mandarin Chinese suffix -bā, originally a lexical morph meaning “bar”, which also helps to form locative nouns conveying a broad range of meanings, as e.g. in yóuxìbā (game-bā) “amusement arcade” or in yǎnbā (eye-bā), a kind of optometry clinic. We shall show that apparent polysemy may be a consequence of generalization, rather than of specialization in meaning, and that the mechanisms involved in the evolution of derivational affixes are mostly analogous to those of grammaticalisation