This thesis offers a unified account of reduplication in Southern Vietnamese, concentrating on two under-documented polysyllabic patterns --- triplication and AABB --- and on the avoidance effects that block certain base–reduplicant combinations. Earlier studies describe these facts, but either restrict attention to disyllables or cannot capture how tone, avoidance, and reduplicant shape interact.This study addresses these gaps through three main contributions. First, it provides substantial new data on previously under-documented reduplication patterns that (1) enhance Vietnamese linguistic documentation and (2) provide a robust empirical foundation for formal analysis. Second, it offers a description of the identical patterns avoided across reduplication types, previously sparsely covered in the literature. Third, I offer a formal analysis of the polysyllabic reduplication types --- triplication and AABB --- using tools from Optimality Theory (OT). Although the analysis draws on OT for formalization, it remains framework-neutral and broadly applicable.A key claim of this thesis is that the so-called triplication in Vietnamese results from the attachment of two distinct reduplicative morphemes, each with its own allomorphs, and not recursive reduplication. In this view, Vietnamese reduplication is best understood as the use of lexically specified reduplicant morphemes. Specifically, morphology selects an allomorph according to phonological properties of the base (notably tone); phonology then merely enforces its placement. High-ranking alignment constraints and Max-IO constraints keep the selected allomorph at its designated edge and preserve its lexical tone. Avoidance patterns therefore emerge from the selectional restrictions imposed by lexically specified allomorphs, thus avoiding theoretical issues such as ranking paradoxes.Rather than invoking multiple constraint rankings, all attested patterns can be captured within a single unified grammar in which lexically specified reduplicants select appropriate stems. This allomorphy-based analysis provides a principled account of complex reduplication patterns in Southern Vietnamese, addressing and resolving previous theoretical challenges.
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