| 词组 | redundancy |
| 释义 | redundancy Have you ever felt that when you were talking to someone you were not being listened to? That your message was being misunderstood, or only partially understood? We have all had that experience, surely. It could be described as transmitting a message over a noisy channel—the noise in this instance being whatever it is in the mind of our listener that distracts attention from what we are saying. It is analogous to the problem of sending a message by radio or telephone through a lot of static. Every language, it seems, has built-in mechanisms for helping the spoken message penetrate the noise. These mechanisms are called redundancy, a sense of the term perhaps borrowed from information science, the mathematical study of the transmission of electronic messages. A useful definition of redundancy can be found in Todd & Hancock 1986: In linguistics, it refers to data which may be unnecessary but which may help our understanding. In a phrase such as: those two dogs plurality is marked three times. Most speech contains redundancies and so we often understand utterances even if we miss part of what was said. This redundancy is something that helps a speaker or a writer get a message across even when the hearer or reader has missed part of it through inattention or distraction. This, then, is a useful redundancy; it protects the message and it facilitates the reception of the information or the idea the speaker or writer is trying to communicate. Repetition, in one way or another, is the most obvious form of useful redundancy; by repeating an idea or a whole message, the writer or speaker can ensure that the reader or hearer does not miss the point. But, as the information scientists point out, a price must be paid for this use of repetition. It is loss of transmission speed. If everything in the message were to be repeated, transmission speed would slow down to almost nothing. If the speaker repeats and repeats, communication is likely to be broken altogether; the hearer falls asleep or walks away. If the writer repeats and repeats, the reader closes the book. This brings us to a second meaning of redundancy that Todd & Hancock mentions: the use of too many words, what we might call wordy redundancy. The whole question of redundancy for writers comes down to the identification of the fine line between useful redundancy and wordy redundancy. This is seldom a problem in conversation, unless you have the misfortune to be a long-winded bore, but it may be one for the public speaker. It is also not a problem for usage writers, almost all of whom fail to recognize that there is such a thing as useful redundancy, even though they employ it themselves. Here are a number of examples of useful redundancy. We will depart from the usual style of our examples and italicize the redundancies. You will note that many of them involve adverbs and prepositions. There are also several examples with emphasizing adjectives. • These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad.... I number them so that I can refer back to them —George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946 • ... to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground —Genesis 8:8 (AV), 1611 • And both return back to their chairs —Shakespeare, Richard II, 1596 • ... would also revert back to Panama —Current Biography, June 1968 • concur ... has three different meanings —Harper 1985 • There is also the additional problem raised by the casting ... —John Simon, New York, 5 Apr. 1976 • ... are usually unnecessary padding in a sentence — Little, Brown 1986 • ... marked for James the final end of his freedom — K. M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words, 1977 • ... one's past history was going to be removed — Norman Mailer, Harper's, March 1971 • ... the process of starting over again —Leacock 1943 • ... let us begin with a true and authentic story —W. M. Thackeray, The Book of Snobs, 1846 • ... the unequal combat waged here nightly is replayed again —Robert E. Taylor, Wall Street Jour., 11 Sept. 1980 • ... it commands our attention so much that we are never necessitated to repeat the same thing over a second time—Adam Smith, lecture, 14 Jan. 1763, in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. John M. Lothian, 1971 None of these redundancies impedes the flow of information, not even the last and longest (taken from speech, where longer redundancies are more useful than they are in writing). They all belong to our first type of redundancy—the useful—or if not positively useful, at least harmless. It is interesting that the handbooks quoted here (especially Harper 1985 and Little, Brown 1986) devote considerable space to the denunciation of exactly these kinds of redundant combinations, as does the book written by John Simon (Simon 1980). And George Orwell, in the very article we have quoted, lays it down as a rule that we should cut all unnecesssary words out of our writing. The notion that redundant words should be eliminated from writing goes back to the 18th century. Lindley Murray 1795 put it this way: • The first rule for promoting the strength of a sentence, is, to prune it of all redundant words and members. Murray may have taken this rule from one of his sources. It is not much different from Orwell's: • If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. But it had been recognized by writers as early as Ben Jonson that too terse a style could be a fault, not a virtue: • ... the Language is thinne, flagging, poore, starv'd; scarce covering the bone, and shewes like stones in a sack. Some men to avoid Redundancy, runne into that; and while they strive to have no ill blood, or Juyce, they loose their good —Timber: or, Discoveries, before 1637 Some recent commentators too, such as Evans 1957 and Bailey 1984, warn against being too concise. To repeat, there are two kinds of redundancy—the desirable kind of the linguist and the undesirable wordy kind. Much that is written in usage books about redundancy mistakes the first for the second. The usual pronouncements about refer back, final result, collaborate together, continue on, end result, past history, general consensus, personal friend, off of, and many, many more should therefore be taken with a large grain of salt. This is not to say that you must use the redundant forms, but you should feel free to judge for yourself where they may be useful to communication or may simply sound better than the shorter alternatives. Remember that the sound and rhythm of a sentence are important in transmitting your message through the noise: • ... inside a sentence the mere sound, the mere number of syllables used, is sometimes more important than the bare meaning of the words. In writing, as in conversation, an economical use of words is not always what we want —Evans 1957 See also wordiness. |
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