Opposite of "oxymoron"

[Lynne Murphy]

--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.

> 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?  (Of course, there are some syntactic reasons
for putting "man" in the phrase, but semantic reasons are always more fun
than syntactic ones.)

Lynne



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
Acting Director, MA in Applied Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
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