Repetition (rhetorical device)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
In rhetoric, a tautology is an unnecessary or unessential (and sometimes unintentional) repetition of meaning, using different and dissimilar words that effectively say the same thing twice (often originally from different languages). It is often regarded as a fault of style and was defined by Fowler as "saying the same thing twice." It is not apparently necessary or essential for the entire meaning of a phrase to be repeated. If a part of the meaning is repeated in such a way that it appears as unintentional, clumsy, or lacking in dexterity, then it may be described as tautology. On the other hand, a repetition of meaning which improves the style of a piece of speech or writing is not necessarily described as tautology because it improves the style of a piece of speech or writing.
A rhetorical tautology can also be defined as a series of statements that comprise an argument, whereby the statements are constructed in such a way that the truth of the propositions is guaranteed or that the truth of the propositions cannot be disputed by defining a term in terms of another self referentially. Consequently, the statement conveys no useful information regardless of its length or complexity making it unfalsifiable. It is a way of formulating a description such that it masquerades as an explanation when the real reason for the phenomena cannot be independently derived. A rhetorical tautology should not be confused with a tautology in propositional logic, since the inherent meanings and subsequent conclusions in rhetorical and logical tautologies are very different.
See also
- English language
- English usage
- Figure of speech
- Fowler's Modern English Usage
- Grammar
- Hyperbole
- Language
- Law of identity
- List of tautological place names
- No true Scotsman
- Oxymoron
- Pleonasm
- Redundancy (language)
- Rhetoric
- Vacuous truth
