Pleonasm

Pleonasm is verbosity, the use within an utterance of words close in meaning, one of which is logically redundant ("saw with my own eyes," "first debut"). As a stylistic flaw, pleonasm complicates speech with superfluous repetitions of sense; yet as a deliberate artistic means it may reinforce expression, emphasise a feature or reproduce a colloquial, folk or solemn intonation. In folk song pleonastic phrases lend the utterance fullness and melodiousness. Pleonasm is often distinguished from tautology as a repetition of cognate words and associated with the semantic redundancy of units of different roots; however, the boundary between these concepts is drawn inconsistently in linguistics. The distinction between motivated artistic pleonasm and a speech error is an important task of stylistics and the culture of language, resting on the criterion of appropriateness.