Pleonasm Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Pleonasm is the use of more words than necessary to express an idea. The word comes originally from Greek πλεονασμος pleonasmos (="excess").
| Table of contents |
|
2 Syntactic pleonasm 3 Semantic pleonasm 4 Pleonasms in literature 5 Pleonasms in other languages 6 See also |
Pleonasm can be used in different ways. Sometimes use of excessive words is deprecated, but pleonasm can also be simply an unremarkable use of idiom or even aid in achieving a particular linguistic effect, be it social, poetic, or literary.
While a word is pleonastic if it isn't necessary to denote mere sense, pleonasms can serve purposes external to meaning. A speaker who is overly terse is often interpreted as lacking ease or grace. In spoken language, sentences are spontaneously created without the benefit of going back and editing. This restriction in the ability to plan often creates much redundancy. In written language, sometimes removing words that aren't necessary for mere sense can make writing seem stilted or awkward, especially when words are cut from an idiomatic expression, leading the reader to wonder why the normal idiom wasn't used.
Some pleonastic phrases are part of a language's idiom, like "safe haven" and "tuna fish" in English. They are so common that their use is unremarkable, although in many cases the redundancy can be dropped with no loss in meaning. Phrases like "off of" are common in spoken or informal written English, but "keep the cat off the couch" is also unremarkable to most. In a satellite-framed language like English, verb phrases containing particless that denote direction of motion are so frequent that even when such a particle is pleonastic, it seems natural to include it.
On the other hand, as is the case with any literary or rhetorical effect, excessive use of pleonasm can weaken writing or speech. Too many words can distract from the content. Those who aim to deceive often couch their language in excessive verbiage to hide their true intent. William Strunk Jr. argued for concision in The Elements of Style, (1918):
Syntactic pleonasm occurs when a language's grammar makes certain function words optional. For example, consider the following English sentences:
Semantic pleonasm is more a question of style and usage than grammar. Linguists usually call this redundancy to avoid confusion with syntactic pleonasm, a more important phenomenon for theoretical linguistics. It can take various forms, including:
An expression like "tuna fish", however, will elicit one of three mental responses:
In contrast to redundancy, an oxymoron results when two seemingly contradictory words are adjoined.
In some cases, the redundancy in meaning occurs at a syntactic level above the word, such as at the phrase level:
Sometimes editors and grammatical stylists will use pleonasm to describe simple wordiness. This phenomenon is also called prolixity or logorrhoea. Compare:
As in the déjà vu example above, redundancies sometimes take the form of foreign words whose meaning is repeated in the context:
Acronyms can also form the basis for redundancies:
In many cases of semantic pleonasm, the status of a word as pleonastic depends on context. The relevant context can be as local as a neighboring word, or as global as the extent of a speaker's knowledge. In fact, many examples of redundant expressions aren't inherently redundant, but can be redundant if used one way, and aren't redundant if used another way. The up in climb up is not always redundant, as in the example "He climbed up and then fell down the mountain." Many other examples of pleonasm are redundant only if you take the speaker's knowledge into account. For example, most English speakers would agree that "tuna fish" is redundant because tuna is a kind of fish. However, given the knowledge that tuna can also be a kind of edible prickly pear [1], the fish in "tuna fish" is no longer necessarily a pleonasm, but now disambiguates between the fish and the prickly pear. Conversely, to English speakers who know no Spanish, there is nothing redundant about "The La Brea tar pits" because the name "La Brea" is opaque: the speaker doesn't know that it's Spanish for "the tar". Similarly, even though scuba stands for "self-contained underwater breathing apparatus", a phrase like "the scuba gear" would probably not be analyzed as pleonastic because scuba has been reanalyzed into English as a simple adjective.
Spanish is considered a null subject language because pronoun subjects are usually optional. Consider the following sentences:
The pleonastic ne (ne pléonastique) expressing uncertainty in formal French works as follows:
When Robert South said, "It is a pleonasam [sic], 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, a result of the fact that written Biblical Hebrew was one of the first forms of written language and was written using oral patterning, which has lots of pleonasms. The complex rules and forms of written language as distinct from spoken language hadn't been invented yet when the Bible was written.1
1. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy (New Accents), p. 38 ISBN 0415281296. Also, McWhorter, John C. Doing Our Own Thing, p. 19. ISBN 1592400841Pleonasm usage
There are two kinds of pleonasm: syntactic pleonasm and semantic pleonasm.Syntactic pleonasm
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 considered pleonastic in this case. Semantic pleonasm
We watched the bear climb up the tree.
You should get the climbers off of the mountain.
The last two are good reasons for careful speakers and writers to be aware of pleonasms.Subtler redundancies
(Note that in the first example, déjà vu is a French phrase meaning "already seen.") The redundancy of these two well-known statements is deliberate, for humorous effect. (See Yogiisms.) But it is not uncommon to read or hear someone speak of "predictions for the future" or "predicting the future."
The reader or hearer does not have to be told that loud music has a sound.Other forms
These sentences use phrases which mean, respectively, the the restaurant restaurant, and the the tar tar pits.
In both these examples, the word after the acronym repeats a word represented in the acronym. (See RAS syndrome.)Semantic pleonasm and context
Pleonasms in literature
Pleonasms in other languages
In this case, the pronoun yo ("I") is grammatically optional; both sentences mean the same thing.
The process of deleting pronouns is called pro-dropping, and it also happens in Portuguese, some Slavic languages, in Finnish, and in Lao.
I want you.
I want you.
Another striking example of a French pleonastic construction is the word aujourd'hui, translated as today but syntactically meaning "on the day which is this day".
I fear it may rain.
These ideas are harder to understand than I thought.