Ignorance of the laws of lexical and syntactic compatibility often leads to speech errors. Pleonasm and tautology stand somewhat apart among them.
Examples of frequency speech errors are associated with a lack of understanding of the semantics and stylistic affiliation of certain words. First of all, it concerns paronyms and species pairs of verbs. Two words with similar sound often differ from each other in shades of lexical meaning and style. The importance of distinguishing between these forms for the transmission of meaning is great. That is why the exam in the Russian language includes a number of tasks that test knowledge of the basics of word usage and their compatibility.
Both terms - pleonasm and tautology - denote the so-called speech excess, but these concepts are far from identical.
Tautology is a type of pleonasm. Pleonasm refers to the use of words with a similar meaning within a single communicative unit:
- The main point of the argument lies in the thesis of the text.
- A person usually sleeps no more than eight hours of time .
- Employees will receive a bonus in the month of December .
An 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 expositions, as well as in the speech of poorly educated people:
- Returning from the cinema, we came under heavy rain .
- There is no significant difference in the moral priorities of world religions.
- During the evening, the narrator told us different stories from his life.
But language is a living, evolving organism, therefore it cannot fit into a simple set of schemes and rules. Sometimes the use of semantic related words is justified. Tautology practically does not produce examples of this kind, and there are many pleonastic, in fact, expressions that have become fixed in the language and become normative:
- Due to a malfunction of the elevator, I had to go down the stairs.
- A porcelain vase from China turned out to be the most valuable exhibit of the exhibition .
- The countries of popular democracy are characterized by a multi-party system.
Sometimes writers use pleonasm and tautology as a means of artistic expression.
In the story of A.P. Chekhov "Unter Pribisheev" we read: "... the drowned
corpse of a dead man ... ". The writer uses a similar pleonastic revolution to create a comic effect. The famous aphorism of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol contains a tautology: "I
will laugh with my
bitter laugh ."
In oral folk art, a tautology also occurs. Examples of expressive repetitions can be seen in Russian folk tales, proverbs and sayings: “bitter grief”, “fairy tale affects”, “lie down”, “sit still” and so on.
As we see, the role of pleonasm and its variety - tautology - in the Russian language is ambiguous. Speech redundancy, of course, in a normal speech situation is inappropriate and is considered a gross speech error. But the conscious use of the repetition of similar in meaning and cognate words as a stylistic device in a literary text is quite acceptable.