A Cross-linguistic Comparison of Tautological Constructions with Special Focus on English

As it turns out, utterances like those in (1) are very informative. (1a) was used to explain that fans of the Kinks have accepted that Ray and Dave Davies (the two most famous members of the Kinks) will never agree on anything for long enough to play together again. (1b) was uttered as a means of accepting a member of a couple’s excuse for their having to leave an evening engagement early. An angry husband exclaimed (1c) in order to communicate to his wife that she must accept that he would not shave his mustache at that point, as she wanted. A talk show host communicated that he could accept it if his answer to a logic problem were wrong by uttering (1d). Clearly, there is more to the meanings and uses of tautologies than just their truth conditional values. I am by no means the first researcher to notice this. There have been a variety of different approaches to accounting for the communicative significance of tautological utterances in English. Some researchers, sometimes called Radical Pragmaticists, argue that the meanings of such expressions are derivable by universal pragmatic principles (Levinson 1983, Brown & Levinson 1987, Ward & Hirschberg 1991). Other researchers, sometimes called Radical Semanticists, argue that the meanings of these expressions are conventionalized and language-dependent (Wierzbicka 1987,