Pleonasm and tautology: examples of errors and the appropriate use of similar words

Ignorance of the laws of lexical and syntactic compatibility often leads to speech errors. In their series, a few stand apart are pleonasm and tautology.

Examples of frequency speech errors are associated with a lack of understanding of semantics and stylistic affiliation of certain words. First of all, it concerns paronyms and specific pairs of verbs. Two words with a similar sound are often distinguished from each other by shades of lexical meaning and style affiliation. The importance of distinguishing such forms for the transfer of meaning is great. That is why the Unified State Exam in Russian includes a number of tasks that test knowledge of the basics of word usage and their compatibility.

Both terms - pleonasm and tautology - designate the so-called verbal excess, but these concepts are far from identical.

Tautology is one of the types of pleonasm. Under pleonasm is meant the use of words with a similar meaning within one communicative unit:

• The main essence of the reasoning lies in the thesis of the text.
• A person usually sleeps no more than eight hours .
• Employees will receive an award in December .

The extreme case of pleonasm is the use of words not only close in meaning, but also with the same root. Actually, this is a tautology, examples of which are found in large numbers in school essays and exposition, as well as in the speech of poorly educated people:

• Returning from the cinema, we were in a torrential downpour .
• There is no significant difference in the moral priorities of world religions.
• During the evening, the narrator told us various stories from his life.

But the language is a living, developing organism, therefore it can not keep within a simple set of schemes and rules. Sometimes the use of words that have a semantic relationship is completely justified. Tautology examples of this kind practically do not produce, and the pleonastic, in fact, expressions, entrenched in the language and become normative, there are many:

• Because of the failure of the elevator had to go down the stairs.
• The porcelain vase from China turned out to be the most valuable exhibit of the exhibition .
• For the People's Democracies , a multi-party system is characteristic .

Sometimes pioneerism and tautology are used by writers as means of artistic expressiveness.

In the story of Anton Chekhov "Unter Prishibeev" we read: "... the drowned corpse of a dead person ... ". A writer uses this kind of pedantic movement to create a comic effect. Contains the tautology famous aphorism of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol: "With a bitter laugh I laugh ."

In oral folklore there is also a tautology. Examples of expressive repetitions can be seen in Russian folk tales, proverbs and sayings: "bitter grief", "a fairy tale affects", "lie down", "sit sitting" and so on.

As we see, the role of pleonasm and its variety - tautology - is ambiguous in Russian. Excessive speech, of course, is inappropriate in a normal speech situation and is considered a gross speech error. But the conscious use of repetition of similar in meaning and single-root words as a stylistic device in an artistic text is entirely acceptable.