Syntactic reduplication may yet be observed in everyday language, and this will necessiate a linguistic inquiry of the phenomenon. Moreover, the subject is of general theoretical interest, since reduplication is regarded as one of linguistic universals and icons. The quantitative analysis points to that syntactic reduplication is not a very high frequent phenomenon in Swedish. Yet, fiction and conversations show some kind of regular, even though generally infrequent, occurence of reduplication. Thus, the distribution of reduplication in the investigated media suggests that these constructions have a pragmatic rather than a direct semantic motivation.
Reduplication communicates most often the speaker's emotional stance towards the subject matter.
In other words, this repetition has typical diminutive connotations, not seldom universally expressed with a reduplicative construction. Hence, we may conclude that syntactic reduplication is a pragmatically specialized device in Swedish, and the specialization may in turn explain why these expressions are not in a very frequent use in language. From a more general point of view, Swedish syntactic reduplication constitutes an isomorphic continuum as regards the form and function of the constructions and their subtypes. The reason for this is that coordination of identical constituents is possible only if there is some kind of asymmetry, temporal, local or referential. The positive makes no sense in asymmetric contexts of this kind and hence coordination is not applicable.