My long time Indonesian collegue and friend told me in Indonesian
reduplicatives are used to express 'many' . Like f.i. gado gado is a vegetable dish which consists of many "tauge" (soybean sprouts) and "tahu" (tofu) + peanut sauce and spices + egg. It is used for plural things.
(sorry I can't bring up more examples directly)

Maybe there are more languages that have this speciality.