Coordinated tautologies in Spanish and Russian

Abstract

This paper examines a special pattern of tautological constructions -a is a and b is b- in Spanish and Russian. The phenomenon was first described by A. Wierzbicka, who cited Rudyard Kipling’s “East is East and West and West,” referring to it as “double tautologies” with the associated meaning of “irreducible difference.” Later, J. Meibauer called this pattern “coordinated tautologies” (CT) and suggested that they carry the implicature that “the referents of the respective subject NPs should be kept distinct, should not be confused, etc.” In the present study, we address the issue of compositionality in the construction and interpretation of CT. The data taken from Spanish and Russian corpora listed in the appendix and an Internet survey conducted with 91 native Spanish speakers prove that “irreducible difference” is not a necessary ingredient in the interpretation of conjoined tautologies, nor is it its only argumentative point. We also argue that “irreducible difference” is not associated with this pattern alone (it can also appear in tautologies linked by the conjunction, or without any conjunction) and that the exact number of conjuncts is not limited to two. Later, we discuss how exactly the frequent contrastive interpretation arises. Finally, we conclude that coordinated tautologies are not fixed form/function pairs; rather, the meaning they encode can be accounted for in regular compositional terms, and their different interpretations are the result of pragmatic enrichment in which the encoded meaning is combined with contextual information.