The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

On a stylistic note, there must be a careful distinction between tautology and pleonasm,
a mistake of which some scholars are guilty: “the tumor Africus […] shows itself in pleonasm
and extravagance of every kind” (Brock 1911: 208); “pleonasm refers to expressions and
constructions in which a particular notion is expressed more than once and in a manner
different from which strict logic demands” (Gaertner 2005: 31). For a long time, semanticists
have debated about whether it is linguistically possible for two lexical items to be absolutely
synonymous with each other; as one scholar noted, “languages abhor absolute synonyms just
as nature abhors a vacuum” (Cruse 1986: 270). Indeed, very few lexical items are completely
interchangeable in any given context, without the slightest alteration in objective meaning,
feeling, tone or evocative value. Because of this, some scholars have spoken of a „collocation
range‟, that is, “the set of contexts in which it [i.e. synonymy between two lexical items] can
occur” (Lyons 1996: 62). This is a helpful notion because it acknowledges the fluid nature of
synonymy; so, for example, „dark‟ and „obscure‟ are synonymous in the sentence „the room
was dark/obscure‟. However, they convey different senses in the sentence „he has a
dark/obscure sense of humour‟, the first implying that the sense of humour is somehow
morally deviant, the second implying that it is not generally well understood. This situation
was summed up by one scholar, “although in principle word meaning may be regarded as
infinitely variable and context sensitive, there are nonetheless regions of higher semantic
„density‟ […] forming, as it were, more or less well-defined „lumps‟ of meaning with greater
or lesser stability under contextual change” (Cruse 2002: 300). Since words are generally
only likely to be partially synonymous within a given collocation range, it would be wise to
avoid describing the tumor as pleonastic; “often expressions are condemned as pleonastic
prefix which often loses all force in late Latin is –per”. The question holds little relevance for our
study, since the two verbs would nevertheless be synonymous, but for a point of emphasis.
Nevertheless, it is an interesting semantic question.
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