pleonasms

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Wednesday, February 13, 2002 7:30 pm +0800 Laurence Horn
<laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:

> At 4:53 PM -0500 2/13/02, Duane Campbell wrote:
>> On Wed, 13 Feb 2002 10:27:59 -0800 "ANNE V. GILBERT" >
>>
>>>  "Ink pen" is another one. I hear a lot.
>>
>> How 'bout "hot water heater" for what is in fact a cold water heater.

> Yes, it heats cold (or lukewarm) water, but its function is to heat
> water hot.  If "hot" is a resultative rather than a depictive, it
> makes sense and isn't really pleonastic.  I guess this would be more
> convincing if there were other such cases (a smooth floor sander?  a
> clean baby wipe?) but I think it's not impossible to take "hot" to be
> a resultative here.

I don't see how it being a resultative makes it necessarily not a pleonasm.
Isn't the result conflated in 'heater' (i.e., something that makes thing
hot(ter))?  My argument against it is the 'hot(ter)' bit in my analysis of
'heater'.  (I.e., 'heater' conflates the notion of 'hotter', not really of
'hot') 'Hot water heater' is only pleonastic if there could be no such
thing as a 'Warm water heater'--i.e., describing something that heats water
to be warm, not hot.

But...(let me now change my mind!)..._hot_ is a bounded gradable adjective.
I.e., _hotter_ usually presupposes that something was hot to begin with
(unlike _warm_ which doesn't.  You can make a cold thing warmer, but can't
make a cold thing hotter).  So, it seems like _heater_ decomposes into
'increase something's heat' rather than 'make it hotter'--because the water
is not hot to begin with.  So, your resultative thing does work, Larry.
Aren't you glad I wasted our time telling you so?

Except that, I'm still not sure that _warm water heater_ makes sense, and
it should if 'heater' doesn't conflate something like 'hot'.  It doesn't in
other contexts (the heater on a doctor's exam table doesn't make it hot,
but makes it warm or at least not-cold).  Is heater polysemous, with 'make
not-cold' and 'make hot' senses?

Puzzled,
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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