Summary Details
| Query: |
Redundant Word Pairs
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| Author: | Scott Newstrom | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Historical Linguistics
Pragmatics Semantics Sociolinguistics |
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| Summary: |
For Query: Linguist 11.573 Thanks for the responses to this query. As a number of people noted, some of my examples were mistaken in that they weren't actually derived from the different origins that I was seeking in these pairs. This points to the larger question of whether these redundancies are a special case of bi-lingually-rooted pairings or merely a subset of redundant pairs (present, for example, in the Hebrew bible, Old English laws, and so forth). Laura Wright noted that "the doublets come not only from the legal register but also from the business register, because business writing was trilingual for about 500 years in Britain, 1066-c.1500. In this register the languages were not kept separate but were mixed together. The mixing of A-N, Med L. and ME was rule-governed at a morphological and lexical level and involved the calquing of ME and romance words in close proximity in a text - hence we know they weren't just cases of the scribe not knowing how to translate a given word. So you have a long written tradition in the UK of giving the both E. and the romance equivalents of words." She offered the following essays for discussion of the medieval business register: 'Bills, accounts, inventories: everyday trilingual activities in the business world of later medieval England' in D. A. Trotter (ed) Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, D. S. Brewer, 2000, 149-156. 'Mixed-Language Business Writing: 500 Years of Codeswitching' in E. H. Jahr, (ed) Language Change: Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, Mouton de Gruyter, 1998, 99-117. 'The Records of Hanseatic Merchants: Ignorant, Sleepy or Degenerate?' in Multilingua 16/4, 1997, 337-49. Bob Morris Jones noted that "such pairings are common in contemporary Welsh with borrowings from English," and that "there is often a stylistic difference between the two: the English borrowings are avoided in formal contexts by those whose stylistic repertoire includes both members of the pair . . . Because of this stylistic influence, it is possible to dub then 'stylistic doublets' to capture at least one aspect of the Welsh data." Beyond my initial list of terms--hendiadys, binomial, doublet, conjoined phrases, and repetitive word pairs--a number of people made suggestions for new terms--"mixed pairings" or "diglossic conjuncts" (Chris Miller); "A&R conjuncts" (Theo Vennemann); "sister words" (with the reference of "sister cities") (Kaisa Rigdon); and "tautologous expressions" (James Giangola). Daniel Donoghue pointed to _The Oxford Companion to English Literature_, where Tom McArthur discusses his own recent coinage, "bisocation." This however, doesn't refer to terms specifically linked in phrases with "and," but rather synonyms in general which have different origins. The other problem with "bisociation" would seem to be that this term is already in use in other fields of inquiry. Thanks again for the responses -- Scott Newstrom newstrom@fas.harvard.edu |
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| LL Issue: | 11.637 | |
| Date Posted: | 21-Mar-2000 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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