Pleonasm
Greek πλεονασμος, "excess") is the use of more words than those necessary. There are two kinds of pleonasm: syntactic pleonasm and semantic pleonasm.
Syntactic pleonasm
Syntactic pleonasm occurs when a language's grammar makes certain function words optional. For example, consider the following English sentences:
- I know you are coming.
- I know that you are 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 considered pleonastic in this case.
Spanish is considered a Slavic languages, in Finnish, and in Lao.
The pleonastic ne (ne pléonastique) expressing uncertainty in formal French works as follows:
- Je crains qu'il ne pleuve.
I fear it may rain.
- Ce 'ne' est plus difficile à comprendre que je ne pensais.
This 'ne' is harder to understand than I thought.
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".
Semantic pleonasm
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.
Examples of redundancy in English
- ascend up
- head up
- essential necessity
- nonreading illiterates
- tuna fish
- wet water
In some cases, the redundancy in meaning occurs at a syntactic level above the word, such as at the phrase level:
- It's déjà vu all over again.
- I never make predictions, especially about the future.
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?
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 logorrhoea:
- The sound of the loud music drowned out the sound of the burglarization.
compared to, say,
- The loud music drowned out the sound of the burglary.
See also
