Concept / function duplication

Question

I'm looking for a name for the phenomenon whereby some languages like to put chains of words together that mean the same thing, while others don't - just some terminology that would help me search for relevant material.

In English for example, sports athlete and work colleague sound wrong to me (although I realise colleague doesn't always mean someone you work with), as do constructions like the reason is because or the price is expensive or it doesn't weigh that heavy. I can see that these are not exactly the same, but there is a family resemblance IMO.

My language of interest (Thai) seems to like to do this kind of thing (e.g. because I X, I therefore Y or in my opinion, I think X) so I am trying to get a better handle on it.

In light of the answer and comments, it's clear that pleonasm is a relevant term. I agree it doesn’t follow from the fact that word meant superfluous in ancient Greek that it means the same in modern English, but even so, if the Wikipedia page is anything to go by, the basic idea is that we taking a sentence that is already complete and adding something that doesn’t really belong. Most of the Wikipedia article therefore looks at cases where this can be justified by special pleading.

I think that the basic difference I have been reaching for could be that, whereas most of the English examples are cases of duplicating something that is already present, the Thai examples are cases of expressing something that would otherwise have been implied. That does not involve duplication, so wouldn't it be appropriate to distinguish the two types of case, and maybe reserve pleonasm for the first type?

Also, no one seems to have any trouble with oak tree, so why is tuna fish discussed so much? Is the difference to do with the meaning of the modifier? Maybe in the first example, oak means (of a tree or its wood) of the oak variety, whereas in the second, tuna means a fish of the tuna variety. It could be that Thai modifiers tend to be more like our oak than our tuna. I don't know whether there's any established terminology that captures this difference.

Answer 1

I think what you're asking for is covered under a cluster of different terms, but mainly pleonasm.

In general, pleonasm is the use of redundant words, and a pleonasm is a phrase or construction that uses redundant words.¹

In some specific subcases, tautological is sometimes used instead of pleonastic. For example, using a modifier attributively when the thing being modified already contains the sense of the modifier—as in "sports athlete"—is tautological attribution.

Every language (or dialect, or sociolect; whatever) has specific—and different—constructions where pleonasm adds emphasis or intensity or some other meaningful connotation. For example, in English:

• The reason Raid's advertisements say "Raid kills bugs dead" instead of just "Raid kills bugs" is that the pleonastic resultative construction "kills… dead" connotes more intensity.
• Multiple negation, like "There ain't nothing wrong here", connotes intensified negation in any English dialect that allows it.
• I don't know if this has a name, but compare "The store is located at 123 Main St." to "The store is at 123 Main St." Adding the pleonastic adjective/participle "located" strengthens the adjective's usual connotation, implying in this case that the location is more precise.
• Tautological attribution, like "sports athlete", connotes nothing in English. Why? It's not logically substantially different from the resultative case above; it's just the way English happens to be.

There are also specific cliches or idioms that are pleonastic. For example, in English, even though the construction of tautological attribution is meaningless, many specific cases of it are not:

• "Tuna fish" is (at least to Americans) the same thing as "tuna"—except that it implies the cheap stuff in a can, not the stuff they sear at a fancy restaurant. This doesn't work for "trout fish".
• "Safe haven" is the same thing as "haven"—except that it implies something rich people, companies, or countries use to shelter assets, not, say, refugees. This doesn't work for "safe sanctuary".
• "Null and void" is the same as "void"—except in legal jargon, there's case law established around "null and void", and nobody wants to write the first contract that tests whether that case law applies to "void".

Using a pleonasm when the construction has no inherent connotation and the words don't form a cliche usually sounds redundant. A good enough writer/rhetoricist/whatever can sometimes push a new connotation (think of Shakespeare's famous "most unkindest cut of all"). And tolerance for meaningless pleonasm in song lyrics is much higher than in rhetoric. But in general, meaningless pleonasm often sounds not just pointless, but weird.

I think that's the effect you're asking about. And the reason the same sentences in Thai sound fine is that Thai presumably has a different set of meaningful pleonastic constructions from English.

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In the comments, you raised the question of whether these really are cases of pleonasm. Well, it's really a matter of definition. We've got these things that at first glance appear redundant and meaningless, but when you look more carefully, language finds meaningful uses for them. Do we want to say that really isn't pleonastic, because there really isn't any redundancy?

It's really a matter of definition. And this isn't a case where we've got an everyday meaning of the word. Nobody but linguists and lexicologists ever says "pleonasm", and anyone else who hears it has to look it up to know what it means. And when they look it up, they're going to see a definition that matches the use of "tuna fish" and "kills… dead" in English (usually even giving "tuna fish" as the example). So, why shouldn't that be the definition?

It's true that the literal meaning of the ancient Greek word "pleonasmós" is "something superfluous", and this doesn't quite fit. But so what? People were already using the word 1500 years ago (obviously in Latin, not English) to mean "effective use of redundancy to score rhetorical points". We're not speaking ancient Greek.

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_{1. But be careful. In formal syntax theory, pleonasm has a slightly different meaning. For example, in the sentence "It's raining", the word "it" is required by English, so it's not at all pleonastic in the ordinary sense—but it's not required by "universal grammar", or by the general need to map form to meaning, so it is pleonastic in the syntactic-theory sense.}

Answer 2

The edited question raises some further points that I think can only be covered by putting forth a speculative theory of how English speakers understand tautological attribution, which doesn't really fit into my already-too-long initial answer, so I'm going to do that here. I have little theoretical justification and no empirical justification for this theory; it's more just to show how you could explain these facts.

Is there a salient difference between "tuna fish" and "oak tree"?

Let's compare them.

• "Tuna" is a kind of fish or fish meat; "oak" is a kind of tree or tree wood. Not much difference there.
• Both "tuna" and "oak" can be used in ways that feel like noun compounding: "tuna melt", "oak grove".
• Both can be used in ways that feel more like adjective attribution, but with the sense of "tuna-like" and "oak-like": "tuna flavor", "oak finish".
• Only "oak" seems to have uses that feel adjective-y, while also using the "of oak" rather than "oak-like" sense. In fact, even "oak finish" can mean "a finish that's oak-colored because it's made of oak wood".

So, what difference could this make?

Well, we seem to be happier to extend "X tree" to new trees a lot more than "X fish" to new fish. If you've never heard "beechnut tree" or "trout fish" before, I suspect you'd accept the former while marking the latter as weird. This is something that could be tested by gathering a bunch of speakers and a bunch of examples—you could even do psycholinguistic surprise-measure tests. Of course I haven't done any such tests, but let's assume that it's true.

So, what could explain it?

Let's start with Peter Culicover's Construction Grammar-style view of the lexicon and semantic processing, as described in the books ''Simpler Syntax'' and ''Grammar and Complexity''.

When you hear "oak tree", the syntax-semantic interface ends up activating the generic attribution construction in the lexicon, which applies "oak" to "tree", and flags it as redundant. But, at the same time, "oak tree", as a cliche, has its own node in the lexicon, which isn't flagged as redundant, and which overrides the generic construction. So, you understand it as a perfectly normal bit of English, and don't notice any redundancy (unless you think about the words consciously).

What happens when you hear "beechnut tree"? The same generic attribution construction activates the same way. There is no "beechnut tree" cliche to override it. But memory isn't a hash-table-style exact associative lookup, it works by analogy. And "beechnut tree" is similar to "oak tree" and "ash tree" and a bunch of other things, similar enough to activate them to some tree.

If the total activation of this cluster is strong enough, your brain sees "beechnut tree" as something that should have an analogous node: this is an English cliche that you just didn't know. If it isn't, as with "trout fish", the generic construction takes effect, and you get a "redundancy asterisk" in your conscious understanding of the phrase.

So, why would this happen for "beechnut tree", but not for "trout fish"? The difference isn't really a rule, it's the result of a process similar to the kinds of determinations that a multi-level neural network makes.¹ So, factors like how "nice" of a pleonasm "oak tree" is, how "adjective-y" the "beechnut" node is, how many "X tree" cliches you have stored, how often you hear them, etc. all come into play in an analog computation that either does or doesn't reach a sufficient threshhold.

Over time, the clusters of related cliches that languages grow will be partly just a matter of chance, and partly a matter of non-linguistic factors (do English speakers have reason to talk about kinds of trees more often than kinds of fish?), but also partly determined by linguistic factors—the fact that "oak" can be used adjectivishly more easily than "tuna" only matters because English has an adjective+noun construction that's more productive than noun+noun.

And you'd expect both the nonlinguistic cultural factors and the linguistic factors to be different for Thai speakers than for English speakers.

Unfortunately, I know little about Thai, but let's compare Japanese and Spanish to English.

In Japanese, nouns being used as modifiers need a special particle—but it's a fully productive construction. Plus, many words that tend to be adjectives in other languages are nouns in Japanese, even ones rarely used outside the modifier construction. So, the fact that "oak" is sort of adjectivish shouldn't matter at all, and all tautological attribution cliches should be very "nice", so it should be much easier for the pattern to spread to new idioms. It might even generalize to the level where we'd call it a semi-regular construction, or even to a productive one that can be applied anywhere.

In Spanish, on the other hand, you can't modify nouns with nouns except for a very restricted, non-productive set. Instead, you're usually forced to use prepositional constructions (like "the fish of the tuna" as opposed to "the tuna fish"). Those are less likely to be stored as idioms, so you'd expect Spanish to have fewer "tuna fish"-style cases, and to be much more resistant to forming new ones.

Again, I haven't done any research to see whether these expectations are true, but let's pretend I did, and they are. So then, you could look at Thai and make some predictions about how freely it accepts "tuna fish" style pleonasms, and see if those predictions are right. You could then apply similar reasoning to other pleonastic constructions. If it all works out, instead of a vague sense that "Thai seems to allow more redundancy than English", you'd have a catalog of the kinds of pleonasm that Thai and English each tend to allow, and how freely each language allows them.

But again, I haven't done all that work. All I can do is show that it makes sense for English and Thai to differ in the kinds of pleonasm they allow and how freely they allow them, for (at least partly) linguistic reasons. And that it's at least plausible that the contrasts you were asking about are real, and can be explained, but don't have a single simple explanation.

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_{1. Of course at the bottom level, your brain is such a neural network. But this is probably a few levels higher than that, and we manifestly do have rule-like as well as network-like reasoning at that level. In particular, the syntax-semantic interface that gives us "modifier + modificand" and the semantic processor that therefore applies the modifier to the modificand are rule-like.}