An Examination of the Controversy over English Nominal Tautologies
摘要
Many researchers have been fascinated by nominal tautological expressions such as Business\nis business and War is war and have attempted to solve the mystery they present with radical\npragmatic approaches, radical semantic approaches, and non-radical approaches. Moreover,\nin recent years, two new waves have emerged: cognitive linguistic approaches and relevance\ntheoretic approaches. Several related articles have been published on English nominal\ntautology. However, there is controversy as to how the expressions are interpreted, and no one\nhas succeeded in characterizing their interpretations properly. Is it possible to include cases of\nEnglish nominal tautology in a unified viewpoint analysis?\nAs a starting point for clarifying the overall picture of the interpretation process of English\nnominal tautology, this paper examines previous English nominal tautology studies, and\nattempts to identify their problematic points. In the course of observing the data in detail, I\nfind that the function of the English nominal tautology A is A is to express an objection to an\nutterance or a thought that is attributed to someone other than the speaker at the utterance\npoint. On the basis of this finding, I suggest that there are two factors involved in the process\nof interpreting English nominal tautology: objection and attributiveness. How large a range of\nEnglish nominal tautology data can be covered by this function will be a subject of my future\nresearch.