The redundancy of the personal refl exive pronoun self: To the question of non-banal grammatical pleonasm

Abstract

The article deals with the case of grammatical pleonasm, which involves the verbalization of the verbal position of the actant or localizer by the case forms of the personal refl exive pronoun self, which have a spatial or subject-object meaning. This phenomenon is widespread in modern usage (at least 50 verbs participate in it), in diff erent types of discourse (journalistic, political, advertising, colloquial, literary, educational and scientifi c), in oral and written speech, but it is not comprehended in terms of “language norm” or “speech error”, although the data of explanatory dictionaries impose a ban on the duplicate use of the pronoun self with some verbs. The article proves the defi ciency of such combinations based on the semantic analysis of verbs, as well as by means of grammatical transformation – changing the part of speech or word order, which serve as additional methods of error verifi cation. Based on the analysis of semantics, the list of verbs (50 units) that form pleonastic collocations (55 units) with all members of the case paradigm (Genitive, Accusative, Dative, Ablative and Locative with or without a preposition) of the personal refl exive pronoun self was revealed. Pleonastic control is provoked mainly by transitive verbs with the meaning of “location” and “placement / movement of an object” (integrating it into something, or excluding it, joining it with something, collecting or eliminating), as well as the meaning of “possessing” or “obtaining”. In metaphorical contexts with these verbs, the pronoun self is also redundant. From the point of view of linguistic logic, semantics and existing dictionary stipulations, this phenomenon should be codifi ed as a grammatical pleonasm.

Keywords

• pleonasm
• pleonastic combination
• grammatical pleonasm
• personal reflexive pronoun
• verbal semantics
• incorporated seme
• desemantization
• dispositive norm