Postby thegooseking » May 27th, 2015 4:46 pm
Murius-さん、
I think the answer to this can be found in onomatopoeia.
ずるずる is an adjective or と-adverb that means 'slithering', which sounds appropriate for a giant lizard creature, in the context of the sentence.
Reduplication like this (ずる + ずる) often occurs in Japanese in words based on onomatopoeia. But we're talking about a big, lumbering lizard-man. If we accept that ずる is an onomatopoeic base, the character り has the onomatopoeic effect of making it sound softer or slower (probably slower, in this case). Compare with, for instance, のそのそ vs. のそり. Actually that's perhaps a bad example, since both mean "moving slowly", but hopefully you get the idea.
So I think it's slightly different to するり／つるり, but only in the sense that in those cases the り makes it softer, while in this case, the り makes it slower.
Note that, in constructions like this, the り should be pronounced more softly than usual to get the full onomatopoeic effect.
小狼
