Understanding Nominal Tautology: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective

As a prevailing linguistic phenomenon,tautology is a special way of expression with a special construction.In a general sense,syntactically a tautology is a "SVC" pattern with its subject and complement in an identical form and its usual linking verb "BE"(the corresponding Chinese character is "是");Semantically,it is apparently a kind of redundant expression with no obvious propositional content;and yet pragmatically it has significant communicative value in daily verbal communication because of its capability of conveying all kinds of implicature.This paper mainly explores the syntactic and semantic properties of prototypical construction of tautology "NP₁(+a discourse marker) + BE + NP₂",and examines its understanding within the framework of two cognitive linguistic theories.Tautology is one of the controversial topics in the linguistic circle.Logicians, rhetoricians,semanticists and pragmatists all have proposed their views on the interpretation of tautological utterances.Domestic scholars study tautology mainly from the angle of grammar and rhetoric.Among foreign researches,there are three representative approaches to this issue currently:Levinson's radical pragmatic analysis based on Grice's Cooperative Principle,Wierzbicka's radical semantic analysis acknowledging only pure semantic description,and Fraser's compromising analysis emphasizing both the roles of grammatical structure and pragmatic inference for understanding tautology.Nevertheless,all these explanations cannot fully illustrate the working mechanism of tautology.They have not further explained why and how tautology comes into being and effect.Tautology is a product of cognition,so they can be interpreted from the cognitive perspective.After examining the particular syntactic and semantic properties of the prototypical tautological structure,this paper applies two theories in cognitive linguistics—prototype theory and mental space theory to explain the meaning construction and interpretative mechanism of tautological utterances.According to prototype theory,the meaning of tautology is a consequence of the process of categorization.Tautology expresses a speaker's judgment concerning an entity's categoriality.The categorization may involve two stages:the first step is the so-called holistic or gestalt perception,and the second step is a kind of decomposition of the perceived whole into individual properties or attributes. Thus by a tautological form certain prototypical attributes of an entity are made salient and more recognizable to the hearer.These prototypical attributes are the essential meaning of tautological utterances.Mental space theory supposes that people construct mental spaces when processing a tautology.One concept in one mental space can trigger another concept in a different mental space.And the cognition of tautology is the result of intra-spatial mappings of diverse concepts in one cognitive domain.Metonymy is such kind of mapping.By metonymic mapping,the speaker refers to a general category to refer to specific salient parts or attributes of that category.These highlighted properties are in fact what a tautology intends to convey.Prototype theory and mental space theory provide two ways of thinking for explaining tautology,but to some degree these two theories are compatible:they are two cognitive models for approaching category,and their illustrations reflect the interaction of cultural,psychological,and functional considerations in the process of human cognition.In particular,this paper discusses the role of discourse markers played in interpreting tautology.As a dispensable part in the tautological construction,discourse markers constrain the implicature inference of tautology.Different discourse markers help tautology convey different pragmatic or attitudinal meaning.They are generally employed as cognitive clues or guidance in the hearer's inferential process.Because Chinese and English are two different languages,there are differences in the frequency,distribution and quantity of using discourse markers when uttering tautology.However,discourse markers in these two languages play a same role and function in a similar way when understanding tautology.Besides,paralleled tautologies are usually easier to be understood even without discourse markers because a contrast is already set up by its two tautological clauses which helps the hearer to comprehend.In the support of realistic linguistic data and relevant cognitive theories,this paper holds that tautological expressions are not only a linguistic fact,but also a necessary linguistic choice for communicative needs.By applying two theories in cognitive linguistics to illustrate the working mechanism of tautological utterances,this present study further proves that it is practical and feasible to study "non-ideal" linguistic phenomena from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.