Pleonasms in the Croatian standard language

Abstract

The authors have gathered a large corpus of pleonasms from language manuals, journals, dictionaries, students’ papers and texts they have received for language editing. They were divided into different categories on the basis of syntactic (word, syntagm, sentence, text), semantic (hyperonym – hyponym, synonymy, anthonymy, inclusion) and formal criteria (number of words). They have been analyzed from a descriptive and normative point of view and the cases of necessary pleonasms (stylistic, phraseological, onomastic, required by grammar, required by situation or context etc.) have been discussed.

Keywords

• pleonasm
• tautology
• language standard
• Croatian standard language