A Construction Grammar Analysis of Tautologies
Han Gao · Jiefangjun Waiyu Xueyuan xuebao · 2010
Previous research on tautologies has neither made a detailed analysis of their form nor offered a convincing interpretation of their meaning.An examination of this phenomenon based on authentic corpus within the framework of construction grammar reveals that tautologies constitute a construction,with a number of variants in form.The function of tautologies lies in reaffirming the category membership of an entity,thus highlighting its typical features in the current context.And the salience of those typical features has a positive correlation with the complexity of the category and a negative correlation with the entrenchment of its meaning.