Opposite of "oxymoron"

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:23 PM +0000 2/12/02, Lynne Murphy wrote:
>--On Tuesday, February 12, 2002 11:47 am -0500 Patti Kurtz
><pkurtz at HEIDELBERG.EDU> wrote:
>
>>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."
>
>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.  (Cf. "collie dog", "tuna
fish".)  "Kitty cat" may be, along with "bunny rabbit", but it
depends on the details of the (child's) lexicon:  for some children,
only small cats may be kitties, and a jackrabbit may not qualify as a
bunny.  There's still redundancy, of course, but the redundancy has
to be defined in terms of hyponymy (proper inclusion) rather than
synonymy (equivalence).  Notice that in general these can't be
reversed (*a dog(gie) puppy/collie)

larry

P.S.  Is "macho man" another example?