On 2009-12-01, at 10:17 PM, Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar wrote:

> Wriiting teachers don't concern themselves with such structural redundancies, but language is impossible without it.  In that sense, it's natural. For the writing teacher "a pair of twins" is redundant because it contains an unnecessary repetition of the dual number of both "pair" and "twins." 

The origin of this discussion was the observation that the past perfect was redundant because the situation was already clear. This seems to stray over into what linguists call redundancy. By the same argument, the simple past form of verbs could be removed for most sentences including the word 'yesterday'. In the case of the perfect you have options (as you typically do with selecting aspect) and both remain grammatical, whereas in the past tense case, you end up producing an ungrammatical sentence. But that doesn't argue any more for getting rid of 'had' than for the avoidance of determiners when an anarthrous noun would do or the selection of the progressive aspect. Yet nobody seems to be arguing for these.

Even if we limit ourselves to the writing teacher's concept of redundancy, though, I see nothing at all wrong with 'a pair of twins'. It allows the speaker to clarify that they* are not speaking of one member of the pair, of a group of twins, or indeed of twins in general. Much criticism of redundancy seems to be merely a failure of imagination on the side of the critic along these lines. 

Too often, picking on pleonasm is a mere effort to make concrete a craft that is hard to define. Where it's difficult to make useful comments on a piece of writing, it's easy to vent frustration by striking down words left and right. In the end, many writing teachers, often in thrall to Strunk's injunction 'omit needless words' (see <http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2009/06/27/omit-needless-postings/>), end up imposing their personal peccadilloes on their students in the name of reducing repetition. This is exactly what Brad is doing with his campaign against the perfect aspect.

*Yes, this is the singular 'they'.

Best,
Brett

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Brett Reynolds
English Language Centre
Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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