Pleonasms in English and Ukrainian: Lexical-semantic and pragmatic aspects
Abstract
Pleonasms and pleonastic constructions represent complex processes of interaction between the logic of speech and its expressiveness, between the economy of linguistic means and stylistic overload. The problem of pleonasm or verbosity development represents important linguistic aspects, which are in the focus of present day linguistics. Its resolution touches upon fundamental issues of linguistics in general and semantics in particular, since in the modern context it is crucial to express oneself concisely, to form statements capable of objectively conveying information without elements that duplicate each other’s content, which is the essence of the language economy law. The relevance of the study is grounded in the high frequency of pleonastic constructions in modern communication and in the lack of systematic research addressing their functional potential. Pleonasm is often perceived as a hidden linguistic phenomenon, since in everyday communication it is rarely recognized as redundancy. Speakers intuitively accept pleonastic combinations as natural and even necessary, because their redundant elements are semantically integrated and no longer consciously perceived as repetitive. In this sense, pleonasm is explicit in structure but implicit in awareness: its redundancy is objectively present, yet subjectively unnoticed by language users. The paper considers the phenomenon of pleonasm through the prism of linguistic norms and linguistic usage, outlines its stylistic and syntactic potentials. The key object of the analysis of the problem is the conscious use of pleonastic compounds as means of expressiveness, as well as underlying semantic nature and pragmalinguistic force of constructions. Despite their prevalence in everyday speech, media discourse, literature, academic and public communication, pleonasms remain insufficiently described from a comparative and pragmalinguistic perspective. This paper responds to this problem by analyzing pleonasm as a dynamic phenomenon shaped by cognitive, historical, and communicative factors. Notwithstanding a previous scientific research on pleonasms as constructions that overload the text with unnecessary words, the study proved that pleonasticity performs important pragmatic functions in both the English and Ukrainian languages such as quantitative, emphatic and vocative functions in literary texts and poetic language where these stylistic techniques emotionally color the content.
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