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Pleonasm (Greek πλεονασμος, "excess") is the use of more words than those necessary to denote the intended sense. There are two kinds of pleonasm: syntactic pleonasm and semantic pleonasm.
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2 Semantic pleonasm 3 See also |
Syntactic pleonasm occurs when a language's grammar makes certain function words optional. For example, consider the following English sentences:
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.
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:
Semantic pleonasm, more a question of style and usage than grammar, is when two or more content words overlap in meaning enough such that one word's semantic component is subsumed by the other. Linguists usually call this a redundancy so as to avoid confusion with syntactic pleonasm, which is a more important phenomenon from the standpoint of theoretical linguistics. In contrast to redundancy, an oxymoron results when two seemingly contradictory words are adjoined.
Sometimes editors and grammatical stylists will use the word pleonasm to describe simple wordiness or use of puffed-up vocabulary. This phenomenon is also called prolixity or logorrhea:
Semantic pleonasm
Examples of redundancy in English
In some cases, the redundancy in meaning occurs at a syntactic level above the word, such as at the phrase level:
The use of this kind of redundancy in writing is often discouraged by usage writers, not only because they are needlessly wordy, but because they may imply a distinction when there isn't one. The reader might be left wondering that if the water is wet, does that mean there is dry water too?
compared to, say,See also