I am trying to figure out what to call these phenomena. For example, a sentence containing the words "specific specifications" or "participants participate", etc. Is there a word to describe this in English?
-
I think it's probably something along the lines of a "false tautology", in one sense. But there may be a term for the actual duplication you see.– Hot LicksMar 21, 2015 at 0:47
-
Parenthetically, "...Sharing the Same..." Can you share something different?– LazerAug 11, 2022 at 22:19
Add a comment
|
3 Answers
This is known as
Figura Etymologica
Examples
Gift of giving
Living life
Welcoming welcome
and there is a very lengthy study on the phenomena here: Rhetoric And Repetition: The Figura Etymologica In Homeric Epic
The expressions you wrote are instances of Adj Noun and Noun Verb, respectively. Each expression contains words derived and inflected from a given root. For instance, the lexical morpheme for your first expression is specify (or possibly spec) and for the second, part. With these base words, we can construct a class of words, known as a word word family by attaching to them derivational morphemes, which modify the word's part of speech or meaning OR inflectional morphemes, which modify tense and number. So for instance the word family of spec(-ify) would be specification, specifier, specified, etc. Because a word family contains different parts of speech, a single word family can generate grammatically structured expressions like the ones you wrote. As far I know, there is no term for such expressions in English, but since roots encode semantic information, it's not surprising that the grammatical expressions derived from a word family are often tautological.
