Pleonasm (/ˈpliː.əˌnæzəm/; from Ancient Greek πλεονασμός pleonasmós, from πλέον pléon 'to be in excess')[1][2] is redundancy in linguistic expression, such as in "black darkness," "burning fire," "the man he said,"[3] or "vibrating with motion."
Pleonasm sometimes serves the same function as rhetorical repetition—it can be used to reinforce an idea, contention or question, rendering writing clearer and easier to understand.
[citation needed] Some pleonastic phrases are part of a language's idiom, like tuna fish, chain mail and safe haven in American English.
Some pleonastic phrases, when used in professional or scholarly writing, may reflect a standardized usage that has evolved or a meaning familiar to specialists but not necessarily to those outside that discipline.
By contrast, when a sentence is in spoken form and the verb involved is one of assertion, the use of that makes clear that the present speaker is making an indirect rather than a direct quotation, such that he is not imputing particular words to the person he describes as having made an assertion; the demonstrative adjective that also does not fit such an example.
[10] Elements such as "it" or "there", serving as empty subject markers, are also called (syntactic) expletives, or dummy pronouns.
The expression au jour d'aujourd'hui (translated as "on the day of today") is common in spoken language and demonstrates that the original construction of aujourd'hui is lost.
There are examples of the pleonastic, or dummy, negative in English, such as the construction, heard in the New England region of the United States, in which the phrase "So don't I" is intended to have the same positive meaning as "So do I.
An expression like "tuna fish", however, might elicit one of many possible responses, such as: Careful speakers, and writers, too, are aware of pleonasms, especially with cases such as "tuna fish", which is normally used only in some dialects of American English, and would sound strange in other variants of the language, and even odder in translation into other languages.
Similar situations are: Not all constructions that are typically pleonasms are so in all cases, nor are all constructions derived from pleonasms themselves pleonastic: In some cases, the redundancy in meaning occurs at the syntactic level above the word, such as at the phrase level: The redundancy of these two well-known statements is deliberate, for humorous effect.
Irish English, for example, is prone to a number of constructions that non-Irish speakers find strange and sometimes directly confusing or silly: All of these constructions originate from the application of Irish Gaelic grammatical rules to the English dialect spoken, in varying particular forms, throughout the island.
Many are critical of the excessively abbreviated constructions of "headline-itis" or "newsspeak", so "loud [music]" and "sound of the [burglary]" in the above example should probably not be properly regarded as pleonastic or otherwise genuinely redundant, but simply as informative and clarifying.
"Post-traumatic stress disorder" (shell shock) and "pre-owned vehicle" (used car) are both tumid euphemisms but are not redundant.
Redundant forms, however, are especially common in business, political, and academic language that is intended to sound impressive (or to be vague so as to make it hard to determine what is actually being promised, or otherwise misleading).
For example: "This quarter, we are presently focusing with determination on an all-new, innovative integrated methodology and framework for rapid expansion of customer-oriented external programs designed and developed to bring the company's consumer-first paradigm into the marketplace as quickly as possible."
(If they understand Italian and English it might, if spoken, be misinterpreted as a generic reference and not a proper noun, leading the hearer to ask "Which ristorante do you mean?
"—such confusions are common in richly bilingual areas like Montreal or the American Southwest when mixing phrases from two languages.)
But avoiding the redundancy of the Spanish phrase in the second example would only leave an awkward alternative: "La Brea pits are fascinating".
Carefully constructed expressions, especially in poetry and political language, but also some general usages in everyday speech, may appear to be redundant but are not.