Thank you for that, Craig!

Edmond


Dr. Edmond Wright
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>    I had the great pleasure at the NCTE conference a week or so ago of
> attending a highly informative session on ambiguity and redundancy, presented
> by Ken Goodman and Peter Fries. A few of their points seem highly relevant
> here.
>     What I took away (not to be fully trusted) is that ambiguity is a natural
> and inevitable aspect of language. Words and structures evolve multiple
> meanings, multiple uses, and this adds greatly to the meaning making resources
> of the language, but complicates the act of understanding. On top of that, a
> writer/speaker makes guesses about shared background knowledge and shared
> understanding of discourse context. Peter pointed out that the most frequently
> used words (prepositions, for example) often carry the most possible meanings.
> One way in which the language balances out this inevitable ambiguity is
> through redundancy.
>     When we learn a new language, some of these redundant features (like
> getting adjectives to "agree" with nouns in gender or number) seem awkward,
> though they seem quite natural for a native speaker. To someone whose first
> language is Chinese, "seven cows" seems redundant. If we have the seven, why
> do we need the plural marker? As Brett has pointed out, we don't really need
> the third person present tense verb agreement marker or even explicit past
> tense in most contexts. There are dialects of English which do away with that
> redundancy, though we tend to "correct" the redundancy back in  when we see
> it. Similarly, "The plane will leave in two hours" can be thought of as
> redundant. "The plane leaves in two hours" would do just fine, though "will"
> might be thought of as adding an element of certainty.
>    It may be useful to point out the mild redundancy in many uses of the past
> perfect, but problematic when we begin to call it "incorrect" or imply that it
> has no contribution to make.
>    Let's not forget that redundancy has a huge role in helping out a
> reader/listener or forget that many kinds of redundancies fly under our radar
> every time we use language.
> 
> Craig
> 
> 
> Brett Reynolds wrote: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
>> 
>> -----------------------
>> Brett Reynolds
>> English Language Centre
>> Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
>> Toronto, Ontario, Canada
>> [log in to unmask]
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>>   
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