Have Your Cake and Kill Him Too

When the tycoon owner of a spectacularly tacky sports bar is killed, Nora Blackbird suspects a secretive politician, a shady former rock star doubling as a pastry chef, and a dangerous aristo-brat on the verge of stardom.

Syntactic doubling is the phenomenon in which a constituent, i.e., a morphosyntactic feature, morpheme, word or phrase, is expressed two or more times within a clause. Since such duplicates are often redundant in that they do not contribute to semantic interpretation, the question arises as to why they are possible or necessary. This theoretical question becomes even more urgent in view of the fact that closely related language varieties such as the dialects of one dialect family often differ with respect to the possibility of doubling.