Opposite of "oxymoron"

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:00 PM +0000 2/12/02, Lynne Murphy wrote:
>--On Tuesday, February 12, 2002 12:51 pm +0800 Laurence Horn
><laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
>
>>>Yes, it's a pleonasm.  (Or you could just call it 'redundant'.)  They're
>>>certainly not limited to baby-talk.
>>>
>>Maybe, but for most speakers "puppy dog" is not an example; "puppy"
>>is a hyponym of "dog", not a synonym.
>
>Yes, but "pleonasm" just means that it's redundant, not that it's perfectly
>redundant. Similarly, the two elements in an oxymoron are rarely (if ever)
>perfectly antonymous either.

True, but by '"puppy dog' is not an example' I meant not that it
wasn't an example of pleonasm, but of the originally posited
category, which you don't reproduce above, i.e.

>>Hi.  Some colleagues of mine in the English department are curious as to
>>whether a term exists for word pairs that are the opposite of oxymoron--
>>that is, instead of contradictory, they mean the same thing but are used
>>together, like "puppy dog" and "kitty cat."


>>P.S.  Is "macho man" another example?
>
>I'd say the test is whether (gender agreement on the -o aside) you could
>have a "macho woman" or a "macho boy" or a "macho bunny".  The thing about
>examples like "bunny rabbit" is that if you leave off the "rabbit", you
>don't lose any information, since "bunny" is squarely a hyponym of "rabbit"
>(if not a synonym, for some people), but if "macho" does not include the
>information that the referent must be male, adult, and human, then "man"
>does add information, which means it's not really a pleonasm in the
>'classical' sense.  Right?

Agreed.  That was what was concealed within my question.  ;-)