This book offers an account of the role of gemination as a grammatical and lexical feature of Akkadian and a comprehensive treatment of the nominal and verbal categories that are characterized by it. It argues that gemination is basically an iconic phenomenon: its presence correlates with an extension in the meaning of the word vis-a-vis that of the corresponding word without gemination. This semantic extension is often realized as plurality; in other cases gemination has been subject to a process of grammaticalization, through which it has acquired a more abstract function, mostly that of...