Pleonasm and hypercharacterisation

Lehmann, Christian

doi:10.1007/1-4020-4066-0_5

Cited by 44 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…m Hypercharacterization involves co-occurrence of two synonyms redundant to each other. (Malkiel 1957;Lehmann 2005) The excessive morphological marking has the effect of mutual reinforcing. It bears on the notion of strengthening of informativeness (Traugott and König 1991) as well as layering and persistence as phenomena of grammaticalization (Hopper 1991 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpreting 都 to 1 TO in earlier Southern Min texts

Lien

2015

lingua. sin.

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The paper explores the polyfunctional word 都 to 1 TO in early Southern Min texts dating back to the sixteenth century or even earlier. Unlike 都 dou 1 in Mandarin, which mainly functions as a maximality operator, 都 to 1 in Southern Min is chiefly used as a modal particle expressing a concessive meaning or meaning of unexpectedness as a type of conventional implicature rather than pragmatic inference. However, it can be identified as expressing maximality and exhaustivity in construction with wh-words and negation. In a nutshell, the concessive sense is taken as the default sense unless it is overridden by the interpretation of 都 to 1 as a maximality operator. I will examine the syntactic and semantic properties of 都 to 1 based on these texts. Its interpretation hinges on the structural position it occupies and the collocates it interacts with.Keywords: Maximality; Concessivity; Default; Southern Min IntroductionAs attested in early Southern Min texts, a 都 to 1 TO is mainly subject to two interpretations: (1) a concessive interpretation and (2) an interpretation of maximality and exhaustivity. The two interpretations are structure-driven. The concessive meaning is obtained by the conflict between the at-issue meaning of the sentence marked by 都 to 1 and the presupposition or inferred meaning driven by the linguistic context. b The universal and distributive meaning induced by 都 to 1 is only compatible with the plural meaning carried by noun phrases. Since the construction featuring 都 to 1 is ambiguous between concessive and distributive meaning, we need some linguistic cues to disambiguate it. Let us assume that the concessive meaning is the default, unless the noun phrase constrained by 都 to 1 is a determiner phrases with a plural quantifier. In this particular situation, 都 to 1 would take on the distributive function and become a universal operator. The concessive meaning would be overridden if there was no linguistic cue to bring about a conflict between presuppositions of the word meaning and the atissue expression. Since 都 to 1 alone is potentially ambiguous between the concessive meaning and the interpretation of maximality and exhaustivity, my focus will be to pin down its exact meaning by examining the structural position it occupies in sentences. In addition to structural cues inside sentences, there is a need to draw on crosssentential elements for pinning down the interpretation of 都 to 1 . Our strategy is to first identify the sentence-internal elements that 都 to 1 co-occurs with. If there is a restrictor that 都 to 1 binds, then it takes on the function of a maximality operator

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpreting 都 to 1 TO in earlier Southern Min texts

Lien

2015

lingua. sin.

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“…To use the terminology advocated by Lehmann (2005), we are dealing here with a special case of pleonasm, i.e. hypercharacterization.…”

Section: The Attachment Of An Affix Repeats a Meaning Component Alreamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1, the term 'tautology' seems to have been largely replaced or camouflaged by other designations in the contemporary literature dealing with word-formation. The study by Lehmann (2005) may serve as an illustration of how the general concept of linguistic tautology can be constrained in its scope and application so that it becomes virtually useless in analyzing derivational morphology. In brief, Lehmann (2005: 121) sets out by pointing out that, traditionally, "[t]autology and pleonasm are kinds of redundancy".…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remarks on Tautology in Word-Formation

Szymanek

2015

Semantics of Complex Words

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Tautology in word-formation is a poorly investigated phenomenon, compared to the more robust discussions of tautology in syntax (Sect. 2). On some restrictive interpretations of the concept of 'morphological tautology', it really emerges as an epiphenomenon or else as a terminological misnomer. Within some approaches, the term 'tautology' has been replaced by other designations, such as pleonasm, hypercharacterization, etc. Nevertheless, rare references to tautology in word-formation can be found in the literature, suggesting that tautology may be looked upon as a structural and semantic property of certain types of compounds as well as derivatives, in English and in other languages (Sect. 3). The aim of this article is to bring together a variety of sources that have dealt with the phenomenon in question, in order to estimate its scope, characteristics and diachronic development (Sect. 4). The analysis will focus on data from English and Polish word-formation (with a few examples from German and Irish as well).

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“…Double marking bears close resemblance to a language-internal phenomenon named hypercharacterisation (Lehmann 2006), which results in forms containing two markers for a morphological category, the first of which is usually diachronically older and irregular and the second one of more recent origin and regular. A well-known example is the English plural form children, which has originated from the older form childer (containing the old plural suffix er) by addition of the more recent and more common suffix en (see, e.g., Haspelmath 1993, 289).…”

Section: Cross-linguistic Pleonasmsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiple roots of innovations in language contact

Riionheimo

2013

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This article approaches the origin of multilingual innovations in language contact by presenting data from an intensive contact situation between two closely related Finnic languages, Finnish and Estonian. This situation between languages that have complex interconnected morphological systems often leads to the emergence of structures that contain material from both languages. The origin of these structures is discussed in the light of two basic assumptions: that in the mind of the bilingual speaker, the elements of the two languages are connected to each other via phonological and semantic or functional similarities and that both languages of the bilingual speaker always remain active and available during speech processing. The simultaneous activation of synonymous, competing elements or patterns is hypothesised to be the cause for the inevitable presence of both language-internal and cross-linguistic forces at the initial stage of language change.

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Pleonasm and hypercharacterisation

Cited by 44 publications

References 8 publications

Interpreting 都 to 1 TO in earlier Southern Min texts

Interpreting 都 to 1 TO in earlier Southern Min texts

Remarks on Tautology in Word-Formation

Multiple roots of innovations in language contact

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