Tautology (rhetoric) - Intentional Repetition of Meaning

Intentional Repetition of Meaning

Intentional repetition of meaning intends to amplify or emphasize a particular thing about what is being discussed: to repeat it because one cares about it. A gift is by definition free of charge, but one might talk about a "free gift" to emphasize that there is no fine print, be it money or an expectation of a return, or that the gift is being given by volition.

This is related to the rhetorical device of hendiadys, where one concept is expressed through the use of two, for example "goblets and gold" meaning wealth, or "this day and age" to mean the present time. Superficially these expressions may seem tautologous, but they are stylistically sound because the repeated meaning is just a stylized way to emphasise the same idea.

Much Old Testament poetry is based on parallelism: the same thing said twice, but in slightly different ways (Fowler puts it as pleonasm). This can be found frequently in the Psalms, the Books of the Prophets, and in other areas of the Bible as well. One explanation of this is that when the Bible was translated into Anglo-Saxon, Norman French was still common among the aristocracy, so expressions like "save and except" were translated both for the commoners and the aristocrats; although in this case both "save" and "except" have a French or Latin origin.

Fowler makes a similar case for double negatives; in Old English they intensified the expression, did not negate it back to being a positive, and there are plenty of examples in authors before the eighteenth century, such as Shakespeare. In Modern French, for example, the "ne-pas" formation is essentially a double negative, and in many other Western European latinate languages the same applies, with "ni" or "no", mutatis mutandis, emphasising instead of negating the initial negative. In common French, the "ne" is quite typically dropped, as it was believed to have been in Vulgar Latin.