pleonastic
Part of speech: adj
Morphological type: derivation
Topics: grammar
human-sciences
linguistics
sciences
Etymology: Etymology tree
English pleonasm
English -astic
English pleonastic
From pleonasm + -astic.
Inflected forms:
form: more pleonastic
pos: adj
tags: comparative
form: most pleonastic
pos: adj
tags: superlative
Senses:
gloss: Of, or relating to pleonasm.
pos: adj
tags: not-comparable
gloss: Redundant.
pos: adj
examples: A second class of Subject Expressions in English are so-called pleonastic pronouns such as it and there in sentences like:
 (104) (a) It is raining/It is a long way to Dallas/Itʼs time to leave/It is obvious that youʼre right
 (104) (b) There must have been some mistake/There walked into the room the most beautiful woman I had ever encountered
 These Pronouns are called ‘pleonasticʼ (which means ‘redundantʼ) in traditional grammar because (in their ‘pleonasticʼ use, but not in other uses) they are felt to be (in some vague intuitive sense) ‘semantically emptyʼ, and thus cannot have their reference questioned (cf. ^✽What is raining? ^✽Where must have been some mistake?).
1988 [Hutchinson Educational], Anna Laura Lepschy, Giulio C. Lepschy, The Italian Language Today, 2nd Edition, Reprinted 1992, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), page 107,
In these sentences finchè may be followed by a non which is called ‘pleonastic’ and does not negate the predicate in the subordinate clause: Ugo aspetta finchè non lo chiamano 'Ugo is waiting until they call him'. When the main clause is negative one must always use the pleonastic non after finchè in the subordinate clause: Ugo non si muove finchè non lo chiamano 'Ugo is not moving until they call him'.
gloss: Characterised by the use of redundant words or an excessive number of words.
pos: adj
examples: Before undertaking to show the connection which this papyrus seems to establish between an apparently historical king of the IId dynasty and the hero of a romance of the XIXth (an interval of two or three thousand years), I will give an English version of Dr. Brugsch's German translation, condensing somewhat its more pleonastic passages, but preserving its genuine Egyptian features.
1974, Olgierd Wojtasiewicz (translator), Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Pragmatic Logic, [1965, Logika Pragmatyczna], D. Reidel Publishing Company, PWN-Polish Scientific Publishers, page 44,
A characteristic intension of a term unambiguously describes the extension of that term. But a characteristic intension of a term may be pleonastic, i.e., it may contain more properties than it is necessary to define the extension of that term. For instance, the intension of the term "square" consisting of the properties "planeness, quadrilaterality, rectangularity, equilaterality, being inscribable in a circle" would be pleonastic since it would include more properties than it is necessary to describe the extension of the term "square". […] The complete intension always is characteristic and pleonastic. It is the most pleonastic of all those intensions which are characteristic of a given set of objects.
To sum up, it may be said that the prediction of loss is borne out by the facts in Latvian and its dialects: the highly marked pleonastic morphology is no longer part of the system.[…]However, within the Lithuanian dialect cluster, pleonastic morphology is still a long way from collapsing altogether.
Related words: pleonasmic
Derived words: pleonastical
pleonastically
pleonasticity
Translations: