Pleonasm


Pleonasm is redundancy in linguistic expression, such as "black darkness", "burning fire", "the man he said", or "vibrating with motion". It is a manifestation of tautology by traditional rhetorical criteria. 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.

Usage

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 of idiom. 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 a redundancy 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.

Idiomatic expressions

Some pleonastic phrases are part of a language's idiom, such as tuna fish, chain mail and safe haven in American 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 as It might be possible or perhaps it's possible, where both terms 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 between ontological possibility and epistemic possibility, as in "Both the ontological possibility of X under current conditions and the ontological impossibility of X under current conditions are epistemically possible". The habitual use of the double construction to indicate possibility per se is far less widespread among speakers of most other languages ; rather, almost all speakers of those languages use one term in a single expression:
  • French: Il est possible or il 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 or se 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 a satellite-framed language such as English, verb phrases containing particles that denote direction of motion are so frequent that even when such a particle is pleonastic, it seems natural to include it.

Professional and scholarly use

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", "cease and desist" are legal doublets that are part of legally operative language that is often drafted into legal documents. A classic example of such usage was that by the Lord Chancellor at the time, Lord Westbury, in the English case of ex parte Gorely, 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.

Literary uses

Examples from Baroque, Mannerist, and Victorian provide a counterpoint to Strunk's advocacy of concise writing:
  • "This was the most unkindest cut of all." — William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
  • "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
  • "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''

Types

There are various kinds of pleonasm, including bilingual tautological expressions, syntactic pleonasm, semantic pleonasm and morphological pleonasm:

Bilingual tautological expressions

A bilingual tautological expression is a phrase that combines words that mean the same thing in two different languages. An example of a bilingual tautological expression is the Yiddish expression מים אחרונים וואַסער mayim akhroynem vaser. It literally means 'water last water' and refers to 'water for washing the hands after meal, grace water'. Its first element, mayim, derives from the Hebrew מים 'water'. Its second element, vaser, derives from the Middle High German word vaser 'water'.
According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, Yiddish abounds with both bilingual tautological compounds and bilingual tautological first names.
The following are examples of bilingual tautological compounds in Yiddish:
  • פֿינצטער חושך fíntster khóyshekh 'very dark', literally 'dark darkness', traceable back to the Middle High German word vinster 'dark' and the Hebrew word חושך ħōshekh 'darkness'.
  • חמור-אייזל khamer-éyzļ 'womanizer', literally 'donkey-donkey', traceable back to the Hebrew word חמור 'donkey' and the Middle High German word esel 'donkey'.
The following are examples of bilingual tautological first names in Yiddish:
  • דוב-בער Dov-Ber, literally 'bear-bear', traceable back to the Hebrew word דב dov 'bear' and the Middle High German word bër 'bear'.
  • צבי-הירש Tsvi-Hirsh, literally 'deer-deer', traceable back to the Hebrew word צבי tsvi 'deer' and the Middle High German word hirz 'deer'.
  • Zev Wolf, literally 'wolf-wolf', traceable back to the Hebrew word זאב ze'ev 'wolf' and the Middle High German word volf 'wolf'.
  • אריה-לייב Aryeh-Leib, literally 'lion-lion', traceable back to the Hebrew word אריה arye 'lion' and the Middle High German word lewe 'lion'.
Examples occurring in English-language contexts include:River Avon, literally 'River River', from Welsh.the Sahara Desert, literally 'the The Desert Desert', from Arabic.the La Brea Tar Pits, literally 'the The Tar Tar Pits', from Spanish.the Los Angeles Angels, literally 'the The Angels Angels', from Spanish.the hoi polloi, literally 'the the many', from Greek.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 Latin Moridunum making Carmarthen Castle 'fort sea-fort castle'.Mount Maunganui, Lake Rotoroa, and Motutapu Island in New Zealand are 'Mount Mount Big', 'Lake Lake Long', and 'Island Sacred Island' respectively, from Māori.

Syntactic pleonasm

Syntactic pleonasm occurs when the grammar of a language makes certain function words optional. For example, consider the following English sentences:
  • "I know you're coming."
  • "I know that you're coming."
In this construction, the conjunction that is optional when joining a sentence to a verb phrase with know. Both sentences are grammatically correct, but the word that is pleonastic in this case. By contrast, when a sentence is in spoken form and the verb involved is one of assertion, the use of that 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 adjective that also does not fit such an example. Also, some writers may use "that" for technical clarity reasons. In some languages, such as French, the word is not optional and should therefore not be considered pleonastic.
The same phenomenon occurs in Spanish with subject pronouns. Since Spanish is a null-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 pronoun yo is grammatically optional; both sentences mean "I love you". Such differing but syntactically equivalent constructions, in many languages, may also indicate a difference in register.
The process of deleting pronouns is called pro-dropping, and it also happens in many other languages, such as Korean, Japanese, Hungarian, Latin, Italian, Portuguese, Swahili, Slavic languages, and the Lao language.
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 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 pleonastic it is marked as ungrammatical although no meaning is lost by the omission. Elements such as "it" or "there", serving as empty subject markers, are also called expletives, or dummy pronouns. Compare:
  • "There is rain."
  • "Today is rain."
The pleonastic ne, expressing uncertainty in formal French, works as follows:
  • "Je crains qu'il ne pleuve."

  • "Ces idées sont plus difficiles à comprendre que je ne pensais."

Two more striking examples of French pleonastic construction are aujourd'hui and Qu'est-ce que c'est?.
The word aujourd'hui/au jour d'hui is translated as 'today', but originally means "on the day of today" since the now obsolete hui means "today". The expression au jour d'aujourd'hui is common in spoken language and demonstrates that the original construction of aujourd'hui is lost. It is considered a pleonasm.
The phrase Qu'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."
When Robert South said, "It is a pleonasm, a figure usual in Scripture, by a multiplicity of expressions to signify one notable thing", he was observing the Biblical 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 the Psalms 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 the Old Testament were written. See also parallelism (rhetoric).
This same pleonastic style remains very common in modern poetry and songwriting.

Semantic pleonasm

Semantic pleonasm is a question more of style and usage than of grammar. Linguists usually call this redundancy to avoid confusion with syntactic pleonasm, a more important phenomenon for theoretical linguistics. It usually takes one of two forms: Overlap or prolixity.
Overlap: One word's semantic component is subsumed by the other:
Prolixity: A phrase may have words which add nothing, or nothing logical or relevant, to the meaning.
  • "I'm going down south."

  • "You can't seem to face up to the facts."
  • "He entered into the room."
  • "Every mother's child".
  • "Ilk man and mother's son take heed" from Tam o' Shanter written by Robert Burns in 1790
  • "What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder."
  • "He raised up his hands in a gesture of surrender."
  • "Where are you at?"
  • "Located" or similar before a preposition: "the store is located on Main St." The preposition contains the idea of locatedness and does not need a servant.
  • "The house itself" for "the house", and similar: unnecessary re-specifiers.
  • "Actual fact": fact.
  • "On a daily basis": daily.
  • "This particular item": this item.
  • "Different" or "separate" after numbers: for example:
  • * "Four different species" are merely "four species", as two non-different species are together one same species.
  • * "Nine separate cars": cars are always separate.
  • "Despite the fact that": although.
An expression such as "tuna fish", however, might elicit one of many possible responses, such as:
  1. It will simply be accepted as synonymous with "tuna".
  2. It will be perceived as redundant.
  3. It will imply a distinction. 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 a dolphin fish." This assumption turns out to be correct, as a "tuna" can also mean a prickly pear. Further, "tuna fish" is sometimes used to refer to the flesh of the animal as opposed to the animal itself. Similarly, while all sound-making horns use air, an "air horn" has a special meaning: one that uses compressed air specifically; while most clocks tell time, a "time clock" specifically means one that keeps track of workers' presence at the workplace.
  4. 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 an aspiration, or as "tuner".

Subtler redundancies

In some cases, the redundancy in meaning occurs at the syntactic level above the word, such as at the phrase level:
The redundancy of these two well-known statements is deliberate, for humorous effect. 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, the nature of this future can be subtle. Generally "the future" is assumed, making most constructions of this sort pleonastic. The latter humorous quote above about not making predictions—by Yogi Berra—is not really a pleonasm, but rather an ironic play on words.
Alternatively it could be an analogy between predict and guess.
However, "It's déjà vu all over again" could mean that there was earlier another déjà vu of the same event or idea, which has now arisen for a third time; or that the speaker had very recently experienced a déjà vu of a different idea.
Redundancy, and "useless" or "nonsensical" words, 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:
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 "I am after putting it on the table".
  • "Have a look at your 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 a look 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."
Duplicate subject and verb, post-complement, used to emphasize a simple factual statement or assertion.
All of these constructions originate from the application of Irish 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!"

  • "Topless-shmopless—nudity doesn't distract me."

The latter of these is a result of Yiddish influences on modern English, especially East Coast US English.
Sometimes editors and grammatical stylists will use "pleonasm" to describe simple wordiness. This phenomenon is also called prolixity or logorrhea. Compare:
  • "The sound of the loud 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 ; 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 " and "sound of the " 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" and "pre-owned vehicle" are both tumid euphemisms but are not redundant. Redundant forms, however, are especially common in business, political, and academic language that is intended to sound impressive. 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, an oxymoron results when two seemingly contradictory words are adjoined.

Foreign words

Redundancies sometimes take the form of foreign words whose meaning is repeated in the context:
  • "We went to the El Restaurante restaurant."
  • "The La Brea tar pits are fascinating."
  • "Roast beef served with au ''jus sauce."
  • "Please R.S.V.P."
  • "The Schwarzwald 'Forest is deep and dark."
  • "The Drakensberg Mountains are in South Africa."
  • "We will vacation in Timor-Leste."
  • LibreOffice office suite.The hoi polloi.
  • I'd like to have a chai tea.
  • "That delicious Queso cheese."
  • "Some salsa sauce on the side?"
These sentences use phrases which mean, respectively, "the restaurant restaurant", "the tar tar", "with 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. 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 at the 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 say must—be present where it would otherwise be "forbidden":
  • "Stephen King's The Shining is scary."


Some cross-linguistic redundancies, especially in placenames, occur because a word in one language became the title of a place in another. "The Los Angeles Angels" professional baseball team is literally "the The Angels Angels". A supposed extreme example is Torpenhow Hill in Cumbria, where some of the elements in the name likely mean "hill". See the List of tautological place names for many more examples.
The word tsetse'' means "fly" in the Tswana language, a Bantu language spoken in Botswana and South Africa. This word is the root of the English name for a biting fly found in Africa, the tsetse fly.

Acronyms and initialisms

Acronyms and initialisms can also form the basis for redundancies; this is known humorously as RAS 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 my PIN number for the ATM machine." '
  • "I upgraded the RAM memory of my computer." '
  • "My laptop has an LCD display."
  • "She is infected with the HIV virus." '
  • "I have installed a CMS system on my server." '
  • "The SI system of units is the modern form of the metric system." ''
The expansion of an acronym such as PIN or FAQ 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 But redundant acronyms are more common with technical 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 such as "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 :
  • "She slept a deep sleep."
Or, a classic example from Latin:mutatis mutandis = "with change made to what needs to be changed"
The words need not be etymologically related, but simply conceptually, to be considered an example of cognate object:
  • "We wept 'tears of joy."
Such constructions are not actually redundant because the object's modifiers provide additional information. A rarer, more constructed form is polyptoton, 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