Linguistic Pleonasm and Its Examples in Turkish

Pleonasm is considered a figure of speech in classical rhetoric which is based on expression and evaluated as one of the semantic anomalies in prescriptive grammars. It, however, should be defined and classified in the context of different linguistic interfaces, such as morphology, syntax, semantics and so on. Though there exist some researches that evaluate the phenomenon in different linguistic aspects, there is not a work which evaluates it holistically within Turkish and other Turkic languages by other dimensions. Though pleonasms are considered in the context of redundancy, superfluousity or semantic anomaly at fist glance, there are many pragmatic or language-external factors that causes to this phenomenon. Emphasizing an element on a discourse, strengthening the meaning, providing the meaning's safety under different communication situations, increasing semantic transparency, being not sure on some constructions etc. may lead pleonastic usages. There are, however, some diachronic pleonasms which are formed due to language-internal changes. Some of these causes can be evaluated as primary, while others secondary, and pleonasm can be explained through unconscious usages. In this article, the phenomenon which is debated under the term pleonasm in the Western literature and described under the terms ek yığılması, söz uzatımı or gereksiz sözcük kullanımı in Turkish will be tried to be described and classified under different linguistic levels with many examples, as well as with some theoretical and notional background.

Keywords

pleonasm, redundancy, linguistic redundancy, suffix accretion, tautology