Semantics and Pragmatics of Tautologies and Pleonasms

Abstract

This paper is aimed at finding differentiating criteria between tautologies and pleonasms and other expressions with similar syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties through examining a corpus of 1000 examples in English, German and Russian. It is argued that although in logical theories tautologies were considered redundant and non-informative (Wittgenstein, Carnap, Frege, Russell), their wide usage in various discourses and multiple syntactic types suggest their meaningfulness in most cases. From the semantic viewpoint, tautologies and pleonasm of the prototypic structure A1 (to be) A2 are defined as explicative expressions, in which components A1 and A2 are related as a concept and its attribute. The analyzed data shows that the denotative meaning of components A1 and A2 is identical in tautologies, and partially identical in pleonasms. The meaningfulness of these expressions is explained by the variations in the connotative meaning of A1 and A2. Two differentiating semantic criteria for explicitly redundant expressions are suggested in this paper. As my literature review shows, the most commonly analyzed syntactic type of tautologies and pleonasm is A1 (to be) A2 (Seibicke, Wierzbicka). As a result of semantic analysis, several other frequented syntactic types of tautologies and pleonasms are singled out, such as attributive tautologies (academic scholar), predicative tautologies (boys will be boys), tautological or pleonastic parataxis (she’s she, and I’m I) and hypotaxis, which is in its turn is divided into further subtypes depending on the type of the dependant clause (e.g. conditional clauses: if I must, I must). The pragmatic analysis focuses on the illocutionary functions of the expression. It is demonstrated that tautologies and pleonasms can be used in different types of speech acts and have different illocutionary force. Intrasubjective and extrasubjective factors, determining the choice of tautologies and pleonasms by the speaker, are analyzed. Such factors include the observance/flouting of the principle of politeness, shared background knowledge, language incompetence, and affective state. It is proposed that in similar situations speakers tend to use similar expressions. Some situational factors determining the choice of tautologies and pleonasm are described. It is suggested that tautologies and pleonasm are used redundantly only in predicative structures, when their function is limited by the expression of the grammatical categories of tense and aspect (they kissed a long tender kiss).