Talk:Redundancy (language)

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[edit] Function of redundancy

This page fails to address the role and necessity of redundancy in human language. -- anon.

It does need some work. I hope to improve all of the related pages on this general topic, including this one, pleonasm, and tautology fairly soon.

[edit] Function and NPOVFunction and NPOV

There's some interesting material here, but I agree with the comments above that the article fails to look at how so-called redundancy functions pragmatically. At times, this article has too much of a school marmish tone. It dismisses such usages when it might be better to clarify the contexts in which such utterances are used and the contexts in which they are stigmatized.

For example "centered around" needn't be redundant. For those who use both, "centered on" suggests a small number of objects arranged symmetrically with a common center. "Center around" suggests a larger number of objects arranged in more or less a continuous circle. Likewise, while true that many careful writers will avoid "end result", it is possible to make a case for a taxonomy of results: initial, intermediate and end. In series of causes with results which in turn funtion as causes of later results, such distinctions make sense and no longer seem truly redundant. Empasis is another function of redundancy: a really, really big problem. And in many languages, this type of doubling carries distributive or emphatic meaning.

It's also interesting that linguists use the expression "reduplication" to refer to this kind of doubling, a term that itself seems to be redundant. How does "reduplication" differ from "duplication"? Interlingua talk email 03:28, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Para. 1: I agree; future cleanup I intend will certainly cover this better (it is a serious issue - serious enough that people keep trying to AfD List of redundant expressions. Para. 2: I don't think I agree with that example and its analysis at all; but there are certainly other examples we'd probably both agree on. Para. 3: I have it on good (but not yet citable - it was a verbal statement by a linguistics professor of mine way back when) authority that "reduplication" was named as it was to be an inside joke among linguists; the redundancy is quite intentional. And "duplication" by itself isn't a linguistics term (or wasn't last time I looked.) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 22:00, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] angle

It bothers me a little that the computer-programming angle of functional redundancy, as it were, is given top billing here. While it's an important issue, redundancy as the scourge of bad prose needs to be highlighted, IMV. I've written about this at User:Tony1/How_to_satisfy_Criterion_1a#Eliminating_redundancy. Should this be linked? Should some of the points I make be included here as well? Tony 05:12, 20 October 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Single-Word Redundancies

May I suggest the addition of a section on words that are redundant or unnecessary within themselves, due to an unneeded prefix or suffix? Someone above mentioned reduplication, as opposed to duplication. Some words that make me cringe are...

  • crispy, which means crisp
  • irregardless / regardless
  • prerecorded / recorded
  • secondly / second (except in those rare occasions when secondly really is an adverb)
  • thermonuclear / nuclear (Don't all nukes generate immense heat upon detonation?)
  • thusly / thus
  • usage / use
  • wrongful / wrong

--His Manliness (talk) 18:12, 15 December 2007 (UTC)