languagerepetition

Languagerepetition is the linguistic phenomenon in which elements of language are repeated at various levels of structure. It appears in spoken and written forms, as well as in sign languages, and can serve communicative, rhetorical, or cognitive roles. Repetition may be intentional, as in literature, or incidental, as in everyday discourse.

Common types include phonological repetition (repeated sounds or syllables, as in go-go-go), lexical repetition (repeated words or phrases, as in a refrain), syntactic repetition (parallel clauses, He came, he saw, he conquered), and semantic repetition (repetition of meaning through synonyms or restatements). Orthographic repetition refers to repeated letters or words in writing, often for emphasis.

Functions include emphasis, cohesion, and rhythm; memory aid; discourse signaling; and in poetry or oratory devices such as anaphora and epistrophe that exploit repetition for effect. In natural language processing and text generation, repetition can be a quality issue arising from training data biases or search strategies. In cognition, repetition can aid encoding but may reflect processing difficulty in speech disorders such as stuttering.

See also: repetition (linguistics), anaphora, pleonasm, reduplication, and stuttering.