СТАТЬЯ ЗНАЧИТ СТАТЬЯ: ОБ ОДНОМ КЛАССЕ ТАВТОЛОГИЧЕСКИХ КОНСТРУКЦИЙ В РУССКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ

Abstract

The study based on Internet and corpus data [RNC] deals with a special pattern of tautological constructions in Russian called metalinguistic tautologies. The notion was briefly introduced in 1996 by E. Miki as a label for a set of quite heterogeneous examples, but was not further developed. While other tautologies describe entities in the real world, metalinguistic tautologies refer to the use of a linguistic expression. Such constructions show that the speaker is employing a word or an expression in its common, straight meaning. Therefore, they are most often used when context allows other possible interpretations of the linguistic expressions (such as euphemisation, irony, or hyperbole), and sometimes such alternatives are explicitly spelled out: Inexpensive means inexpensive, not poor quality. Metalinguistic tautologies are established in Russian with patterns Х znachit Х, Х oznachaet Х ‘Х means Х’, X eto X ‘Х is Х’, and are distinguished from homonymous constructions by their semantic and pragmatic features.