A brief reply to Bill,

I noticed the restrictions on which modifiers can be duplicated.

As to the phonology/intonation, to me, it is just as likely that one 
will insert a short pause between the two "very's" ("veries"?? 
"verys"??) and put a stronger stress on the second one (with an 
accompanying nod of the head). This is one thing that underlies my feel 
for the necessity of a comma. But that said, I believe it is simply the 
punctuation convention that requires the two commas. They are treated 
for punc. purposes as compound.

Analyzing this structure as [ very [very big] ] violates my particular 
intuitions. I have no idea how to test for the structure syntactically, 
except that constructions such as "very somewhat big" do not fly; that 
is, you can't change the second very to a different modifier of 
degree?? Can we say something like "it's not just vanishingly small; it 
is extremely vanishingly small"? "Extremely vanishingly small" has the 
structure you propose.

As to length of modifier, what about "That is absolutely, absolutely 
false!!" ?

Another argument against this as a case of morphological reduplication 
is that you can, in theory, insert an infinite number of "very's":

"It was a very, very, very, very, very big mistake."

I don't think you can do this in morphological reduplication -- 
leastways not in prototypical cases.

Johanna Rubba, Assoc. Prof., Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
Cal Poly State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93047
Tel. 805.756.2184
Dept. Tel. 805.756.6374
Home page:
http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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