Pleonasm (/ˈpliː.əˌnæzəm/; from Ancient Greekπλεονασμόςpleonasmós, from πλέονpléon'to be in excess')[1][2] isredundancy in linguistic expression, such as in "black darkness," "burning fire," "the man he said,"[3] or "vibrating with motion." It is a manifestation oftautology by traditionalrhetorical criteria.[4] Pleonasm may also be used for emphasis, or because the phrase has become established in a certain form. Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature.[5]
Most often,pleonasm is understood to mean a word or phrase which is useless,clichéd, or repetitive, but a pleonasm can also be simply an unremarkable use ofidiom. It can aid in achieving a specific linguistic effect, be it social, poetic or literary. Pleonasm sometimes serves the same function as rhetorical repetition—it can be used to reinforce an idea, contention or question, rendering writing clearer and easier to understand. Pleonasm can serve as aredundancy check; if a word is unknown, misunderstood, misheard, or if the medium of communication is poor—a static-filled radio transmission or sloppy handwriting—pleonastic phrases can help ensure that the meaning is communicated even if some of the words are lost.[citation needed]
Some pleonastic phrases are part of a language'sidiom, liketuna fish,chain mail andsafe haven inAmerican English. They are so common that their use is unremarkable for native speakers, although in many cases the redundancy can be dropped with no loss of meaning.
When expressing possibility, English speakers often use potentially pleonastic expressions such asIt might be possible orperhaps it's possible, where both terms (verbmight or adverbperhaps along with the adjectivepossible) have the same meaning under certain constructions. Many speakers of English use such expressions for possibility in general, such that most instances of such expressions by those speakers are in fact pleonastic. Others, however, use this expression only to indicate a distinction betweenontological possibility andepistemic possibility, as in "Both the ontological possibility of X under current conditions and the ontological impossibility of X under current conditions are epistemically possible" (inlogical terms, "I am not aware of any facts inconsistent with the truth of proposition X, but I am likewise not aware of any facts inconsistent with the truth of the negation of X"). The habitual use of the double construction to indicate possibilityper se is far less widespread among speakers of most[citation needed] other languages (except in Spanish; see examples); rather, almost all speakers of those languages use one term in a single expression:[dubious –discuss]
French:Il est possible oril peut arriver.
Portuguese:O que é que, lit. "What is it that", a more emphatic way of saying "what is";O que usually suffices.
Romanian:Este posibil orse poate întâmpla.
Typical Spanish pleonasms
Voy a subir arriba – I am going to go up upstairs, "arriba" not being necessary.
Entra adentro – enter inside, "adentro" not being necessary.
Turkish has many pleonastic constructs because certain verbs necessitate objects:
yemek yemek – to eat food.
yazı yazmak – to write writing.
dışarı çıkmak – to exit outside.
içeri girmek – to enter inside.
oyun oynamak – to play a game.
In asatellite-framed language like English,verb phrases containingparticles that denote direction of motion are so frequent that even when such a particle is pleonastic, it seems natural to include it (e.g. "enter into").
Some pleonastic phrases, when used in professional or scholarly writing, may reflect a standardized usage that has evolved or a meaning familiar to specialists but not necessarily to those outside that discipline. Such examples as "null and void", "each and every" arelegal doublets that are part oflegally operative language that is often drafted into legal documents. A classic example of such usage was that by theLord Chancellor at the time (1864),Lord Westbury, in the English case ofex parte Gorely,[6] when he described a phrase in an Act as "redundant and pleonastic". This type of usage may be favored in certain contexts. However, it may also be disfavored when used gratuitously to portray false erudition, obfuscate, or otherwise introduce verbiage, especially in disciplines where imprecision may introduce ambiguities (such as the natural sciences).[7]
"I will be brief: your noble son is mad:/Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,/What is't but to be nothing else but mad?" —Hamlet (Act 2, Scene 2)
"Let me tell you this, when social workers offer you, free, gratis and for nothing, something to hinder you from swooning, which with them is an obsession, it is useless to recoil ..." —Samuel Beckett,Molloy
A bilingual tautological expression is a phrase that combines words that mean the same thing in two different languages.[8]: 138 An example of a bilingual tautological expression is theYiddish expressionמים אחרונים וואַסערmayim akhroynem vaser. It literally means "water last water" and refers to "water for washing the hands after meal, grace water".[8]: 138 Its first element,mayim, derives from theHebrewמים ['majim] "water". Its second element,vaser, derives from theMiddle High German wordvaser "water".
According toGhil'ad Zuckermann, Yiddish abounds with both bilingual tautological compounds and bilingual tautological first names.[8]: 138
The following are examples of bilingual tautological compounds in Yiddish:
פֿינצטער חושךfíntster khóyshekh "very dark", literally "dark darkness", traceable back to the Middle High German wordvinster "dark" and the Hebrew word חושךħōshekh "darkness".[8]: 138
חמור-אייזלkhamer-éyzļ "womanizer", literally "donkey-donkey", traceable back to the Hebrew word חמור [ħă'mōr] "donkey" and the Middle High German wordesel "donkey".[8]: 138
The following are examples of bilingual tautological first names in Yiddish:
דוב-בערDov-Ber, literally "bear-bear", traceable back to the Hebrew wordדבdov "bear" and the Middle High German wordbër "bear".[8]: 138
צבי-הירשTsvi-Hirsh, literally "deer-deer", traceable back to the Hebrew wordצביtsvi "deer" and the Middle High German wordhirz "deer".[8]: 138
זאב-וואָלףZe'ev-Volf, literally "wolf-wolf", traceable back to the Hebrew wordזאבze'ev "wolf" and the Middle High German wordvolf "wolf".[8]: 138
אריה-לייבAryeh-Leib, literally "lion-lion", traceable back to the Hebrew wordאריהarye "lion" and the Middle High German wordlewe "lion".[8]: 138
Examples occurring in English-language contexts include:
Carmarthen Castle, may actually have "castle" in it three times: In its Welsh form,Castell Caerfyrddin, "Caer" means fort, while "fyrddin" is thought to be derived from the LatinMoridunum ("sea fort") making Carmarthen Castle "fort sea-fort castle".
In this construction, theconjunctionthat is optional when joining a sentence to averb phrase withknow. Both sentences are grammatically correct, but the wordthat is pleonastic in this case. By contrast, when a sentence is in spoken form and the verb involved is one of assertion, the use ofthat makes clear that the present speaker is making an indirect rather than a direct quotation, such that he is not imputing particular words to the person he describes as having made an assertion; the demonstrative adjectivethat also does not fit such an example. Also, some writers may use "that" for technical clarity reasons.[9] In some languages, such as French, the word is not optional and should therefore not be considered pleonastic.
The same phenomenon occurs inSpanish with subject pronouns. Since Spanish is anull-subject language, which allows subject pronouns to be deleted when understood, the following sentences mean the same:
"Yo te amo."
"Te amo."
In this case, the pronounyo ('I') is grammatically optional; both sentences mean "I love you" (however, they may not have the same tone orintention—this depends onpragmatics rather than grammar). Such differing butsyntactically equivalent constructions, in many languages, may also indicate a difference inregister.
In contrast, formal English requires an overt subject in each clause. A sentence may not need a subject to have valid meaning, but to satisfy the syntactic requirement for an explicit subject a pleonastic (ordummy pronoun) is used; only the first sentence in the following pair is acceptable English:
"It's raining."
"Is raining."
In this example the pleonastic "it" fills the subject function, but it contributes no meaning to the sentence. The second sentence, which omits the pleonasticit is marked as ungrammatical although no meaning is lost by the omission.[10] Elements such as "it" or "there", serving as empty subject markers, are also called (syntactic)expletives, or dummy pronouns. Compare:
"There is rain."
"Today is rain."
The pleonasticne (ne pléonastique), expressing uncertainty in formalFrench, works as follows:
"Je crains qu'il ne pleuve." ('I fear it may rain.')
"Ces idées sont plus difficiles à comprendre que je ne pensais." ('These ideas are harder to understand than I thought.')
Two more striking examples of French pleonastic construction areaujourd'hui andQu'est-ce que c'est?.
The wordaujourd'hui/au jour d'hui is translated as 'today', but originally means "on the day of today" since the now obsoletehui means "today". The expressionau jour d'aujourd'hui (translated as "on the day of today") is common in spoken language and demonstrates that the original construction ofaujourd'hui is lost. It is considered a pleonasm.
The phraseQu'est-ce que c'est? meaning 'What's that?' or 'What is it?', while literally, it means "What is it that it is?".
There are examples of the pleonastic, or dummy, negative in English, such as the construction, heard in the New England region of the United States, in which the phrase "So don't I" is intended to have the same positive meaning as "So do I."[11][12]
WhenRobert South said, "It is a pleonasm, a figure usual inScripture, by a multiplicity of expressions to signify one notable thing",[13] he was observing theBiblical Hebrew poetic propensity to repeat thoughts in different words, since written Biblical Hebrew was a comparatively early form of written language and was written using oral patterning, which has many pleonasms. In particular, very many verses of thePsalms are split into two halves, each of which says much the same thing in different words. The complex rules and forms of written language as distinct from spoken language were not as well-developed as they are today when the books making up theOld Testament were written.[14][15] See alsoparallelism (rhetoric).
This same pleonastic style remains very common in modern poetry and songwriting (e.g., "Anne, with her father / is out in the boat / riding the water / riding the waves / on the sea", fromPeter Gabriel's "Mercy Street").
Semantic pleonasm is a question more ofstyle andusage than of grammar.[16] Linguists usually call thisredundancy to avoid confusion with syntactic pleonasm, a more important phenomenon fortheoretical linguistics. It usually takes one of two forms: Overlap or prolixity.
Overlap: One word's semantic component is subsumed by the other:
"Receive afree gift with every purchase."; agift is usually alreadyfree.
"The plumber fixed ourhot waterheater." (This pleonasm was famously attacked by American comedianGeorge Carlin,[17] but is not truly redundant; a device that increases the temperature of cold water to room temperature would also be a water heater.)
Prolixity: A phrase may have words which add nothing, or nothing logical or relevant, to the meaning.
"I'm goingdown south." (South is not really "down", it is just drawn that way on maps by convention.)
"You can't seem to faceup to the facts."
"He enteredinto the room."
"Everymother's child" (as inThe Christmas Song by Nat King Cole', also known asChestnuts roasting...).[18] (Being a child, or a human at all, generally implies being the child of/to a mother. So the redundancy here is used to broaden the context of the child's curiosity regarding the sleigh of Santa Claus, including the concept of maternity. The full line goes: "And every mother's child is gonna spy, to see if reindeer really know how to fly". One can furthermore argue that the word "mother" is included for the purpose of lyrical flow, adding two syllables, which make the line sound complete, as "every child" would be too short to fit the lyrical/rhyme scheme.)
"Ilk man andmother's son take heed" fromTam o' Shanter written by Robert Burns in 1790 (Ilk is a now-archaic Scotsdeterminer meaningeach orevery, so this adds a second pleonism to themother's child example above, double-emphasising that he meansabsolutely every man, as well as fitting the metre of that verse)
"What therefore God hath joinedtogether, let no man put asunder."
"He raisedup his hands in a gesture of surrender."
"Where are youat?"
"Located" or similar before apreposition: "the store islocated on Main St." The preposition contains the idea of locatedness and does not need a servant.
"The houseitself" for "the house", and similar: unnecessary re-specifiers.
"Actual fact": fact.
"On a daily basis": daily.
"Thisparticular item": this item.
"Different" or "separate" after numbers: for example:
"Fourdifferentspecies" are merely "four species", as two non-different species are together one same species. (However, in "a discount if you buy ten different items", "different" has meaning, because if the ten items include two packets of frozen peas of the same weight and brand, those ten items are not all different.)
"Nineseparate cars": cars are always separate.
"Despite the fact that": although.
An expression like "tuna fish", however, might elicit one of many possible responses, such as:
It will simply be accepted assynonymous with "tuna".
It will be perceived asredundant (and thus perhaps silly, illogical, ignorant, inefficient, dialectal, odd, and/or intentionally humorous).
It will imply adistinction. A reader of "tuna fish" could properly wonder: "Is there a kind of tuna which is not a fish? There is, after all, a dolphin mammal and adolphin fish." This assumption turns out to be correct, as a "tuna" can also mean aprickly pear.[19] Further, "tuna fish" is sometimes used to refer to the flesh of the animal as opposed to the animal itself (similar to the distinction betweenbeef andcattle).[19] Similarly, while all sound-making horns use air, an "air horn" has a special meaning: one that usescompressed air specifically; while most clocks tell time, a "time clock" specifically means one that keeps track of workers' presence at the workplace.
It will be perceived as a verbal clarification, since the word "tuna" is quite short, and may, for example, be misheard as "tune" followed by anaspiration, or (in dialects thatdrop the final-r sound) as "tuner".
"I never make predictions, especially about the future."
The redundancy of these two well-known statements is deliberate, forhumorous effect. (SeeYogi Berra#"Yogi-isms".) But one does hear educated people say "my predictions about the future of politics" for "my predictions about politics", which are equivalent in meaning. While predictions are necessarily about the future (at least in relation to the time the prediction was made), the nature of this future can be subtle (e.g., "I predict that he died a week ago"—the prediction is about future discovery or proof of the date of death, not about the death itself). Generally "the future" is assumed, making most constructions of this sort pleonastic. The latter humorous quote above about not making predictions—byYogi Berra—is not really a pleonasm, but rather anironicplay on words.Alternatively it could be an analogy between predict and guess.
However, "It'sdéjà vu all over again" could mean that there was earlier anotherdéjà vu of the same event or idea, which has now arisen for a third time; or that the speaker had very recently experienced adéjà vu of a different idea.
Redundancy, and "useless" or "nonsensical" words (or phrases, or morphemes), can also be inherited by one language from the influence of another and are not pleonasms in the more critical sense but actual changes in grammatical construction considered to be required for "proper" usage in the language or dialect in question.Irish English, for example, is prone to a number of constructions that non-Irish speakers find strange and sometimes directly confusing or silly:
"I'm after putting it on the table." ('I [have] put it on the table.') This example further shows that the effect, whether pleonastic or only pseudo-pleonastic, can apply to words and word-parts, and multi-word phrases, given that the fullest rendition would be "Iam after putting it on the table".
"Have a look atyour man there." ('Have a look at that man there.') An example of word substitution, rather than addition, that seems illogical outside the dialect. This common possessive-seeming construction often confuses the non-Irish enough that they do not at first understand what is meant. Even "Have alook at that man there" is arguably further doubly redundant, in that a shorter "Look at that man" version would convey essentially the same meaning.
"She's my wife so she is." ('She's my wife.') Duplicate subject and verb, post-complement, used to emphasize a simple factual statement or assertion.
All of these constructions originate from the application ofIrish Gaelic grammatical rules to the English dialect spoken, in varying particular forms, throughout the island.
Seemingly "useless" additions and substitutions must be contrasted with similar constructions that are used for stress, humor, or other intentional purposes, such as:
"I abso-fuckin'-lutely agree!" (tmesis, for stress)
"Topless-shmopless—nudity doesn't distract me." (shm-reduplication, for humor)
The latter of these is a result of Yiddish influences on modern English, especiallyEast Coast US English.
Sometimes editors and grammatical stylists will use "pleonasm" to describe simple wordiness. This phenomenon is also calledprolixity orlogorrhea. Compare:
"The sound of theloud music drowned out the sound of the burglary."
"The loud music drowned out the sound of the burglary."
or even:
"The music drowned out the burglary."
The reader or hearer does not have to be told that loud music has a sound, and in a newspaper headline or other abbreviated prose can even be counted upon to infer that "burglary" is a proxy for "sound of the burglary" and that the music necessarily must have been loud to drown it out, unless the burglary was relatively quiet (this is not a trivial issue, as it may affect the legal culpability of the person who played the music); the word "loud" may imply that the music should have been played quietly if at all. Many are critical of the excessively abbreviated constructions of "headline-itis" or "newsspeak", so "loud [music]" and "sound of the [burglary]" in the above example should probably not be properly regarded as pleonastic or otherwise genuinely redundant, but simply as informative and clarifying.
Prolixity is also used to obfuscate, confuse, or euphemize and is not necessarily redundant or pleonastic in such constructions, though it often is. "Post-traumatic stress disorder" (shell shock) and "pre-owned vehicle" (used car) are bothtumid euphemisms but are not redundant. Redundant forms, however, are especially common in business, political, and academic language that is intended to sound impressive (or to be vague so as to make it hard to determine what is actually being promised, or otherwise misleading). For example: "This quarter, we are presently focusing with determination on an all-new, innovative integrated methodology and framework for rapid expansion of customer-oriented external programs designed and developed to bring the company's consumer-first paradigm into the marketplace as quickly as possible."
In contrast to redundancy, anoxymoron results when two seemingly contradictory words are adjoined.
Redundancies sometimes take the form of foreign words whose meaning is repeated in the context:
"We went tothe El Restaurante restaurant."
"The La Breatar pits are fascinating."
"Roast beef servedwithaujus sauce."
"Please R.S.V.P."
"The SchwarzwaldForest is deep and dark."
"The DrakensbergMountains are in South Africa."
"We will vacation inTimor-Leste."
LibreOfficeoffice suite.
Thehoi polloi.
I'd like to have achai tea.
"That deliciousQueso cheese."
"Somesalsa sauce on the side?."
These sentences use phrases which mean, respectively, "the the restaurant restaurant", "the the tar tar", "with in juice sauce" and so on. However, many times these redundancies are necessary—especially when the foreign words make up a proper noun as opposed to a common one. For example, "We went to Il Ristorante" is acceptable provided the audience can infer that it is a restaurant. (If they understand Italian and English it might, if spoken, be misinterpreted as a generic reference and not aproper noun, leading the hearer to ask "Which ristorante do you mean?"—such confusions are common in richly bilingual areas likeMontreal or theAmerican Southwest whenmixing phrases from two languages.) But avoiding the redundancy of the Spanish phrase in the second example would only leave an awkward alternative: "La Brea pits are fascinating".
Most people find it best not to drop articles when using proper nouns made from foreign languages:
"The movie is playing atthe El Capitan theater."
However, there are some exceptions to this, for example:
This is also similar to the treatment of definite and indefinite articles in titles of books, films, etc. where the article can—some would saymust—be present where it would otherwise be "forbidden":
"Stephen King'sThe Shining is scary." (Normally, the article would be left off following a possessive.)
"I'm havinganAnAmerican Werewolf in London movie night at my place." (Seemingly doubled article, which would be taken for astutter or typographical error in other contexts.)
Some cross-linguistic redundancies, especially in placenames, occur because a word in one language became the title of a place in another (e.g., theSahara Desert—"Sahara" is an English approximation of the word for "deserts" in Arabic). "TheLos Angeles Angels" professional baseball team is literally "the The Angels Angels". A supposed extreme example isTorpenhow Hill inCumbria, where some of the elements in the name likely mean "hill".[citation needed] See theList of tautological place names for many more examples.
Acronyms and initialisms can also form the basis for redundancies; this is known humorously asRAS syndrome (for Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome). In all the examples that follow, the word after the acronym repeats a word represented in the acronym. The full redundant phrase is stated in the parentheses that follow each example:
"I forgot myPIN number for theATM machine."(Personal Identification Number number; Automated Teller Machine machine)
"I upgraded theRAM memory of my computer."(Random Access Memory memory)
"She is infected with theHIV virus."(Human Immunodeficiency Virus virus)
"I have installed aCMS system on my server."(Content Management System system)
"TheSI system of units is the modern form of the metric system."(International System system[a])
(SeeRAS syndrome for many more examples.) The expansion of an acronym like PIN or HIV may be well known to English speakers, but the acronyms themselves have come to be treated as words, so little thought is given to what their expansion is (and "PIN" is also pronounced the same as the word "pin"; disambiguation is probably the source of "PIN number"; "SIN number" for "Social Insurance Number number" [sic] is a similar common phrase in Canada.) But redundant acronyms are more common with technical (e.g., computer) terms where well-informed speakers recognize the redundancy and consider it silly or ignorant, but mainstream users might not, since they may not be aware or certain of the full expansion of an acronym like "RAM".
Apparent redundancies that actually are not redundant
Carefully constructed expressions, especially in poetry and political language, but also some general usages in everyday speech, may appear to be redundant but are not. This is most common with cognate objects (a verb's object that is cognate with the verb):
The words need not be etymologically related, but simply conceptually, to be considered an example of cognate object:
"Wewepttears of joy."
Such constructions are not actually redundant (unlike "She slept a sleep" or "We wept tears") because the object's modifiers provide additional information. A rarer, more constructed form ispolyptoton, the stylistic repetition of the same word or words derived from the same root:
As with cognate objects, these constructions are not redundant because the repeated words or derivatives cannot be removed without removing meaning or even destroying the sentence, though in most cases they could be replaced with non-related synonyms at the cost of style (e.g., compare "The only thing we have to fear is terror".)
^'SI' is aninitialism ofSystème international, which means 'International System' inFrench. The phraseSystème international is itself an abbreviated form of the full French nameSystème international d'unités,[20]: 165 which means 'International System of Units'. The reason why the French initialism 'SI' is used in English is the 11thCGPM (1960 General Conference on Weights and Measures), which stipulated thatthe international abbreviation of the name of the system is: SI.[20]: 165
^Okopień-Sławińska, Aleksandra (2008). "Pleonazm". In Słowiński, Janusz (ed.).Słownik terminów literackich (in Polish). Wrocław. pp. 390–391.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Szymanek, Bogdan (2015)."Remarks on Tautology in Word-Formation". InBauer, Laurie; Körtvélyessy, Lívia; Štekauer, Pavol (eds.).Semantics of Complex Words.Studies in Morphology. Vol. 3. Springer International Publishing. p. 146.ISBN978-3-319-14102-2. Retrieved27 October 2020.The concept of tautology is defined here, rather loosely, as 'expressing the same idea twice in different words'... However, according to some other accounts, such expressions should rather be viewed as instances of pleonasm.
^Haegeman, L. (1991).Introduction to Government and Binding Theory. Blackwell Publishing. p. 62.
^Horn, Laurence R.Universals of Human Language, Volume I, edited by Joseph H. Greenberg, p. 176
^Wood, Jim P. (2008), "So-inversion as Polarity Focus"; in Michael Grosvald and Dianne Soares (eds.),Proceedings of the 38th Western Conference on Linguistics; Fresno, California: University of California Press; pp. 304–317
