Pleonastic compounds are not common in European languages (Garnani 2015) and the phenomenon of pleonasm in compounding has not been fully examined in the studies of English morphology (cf. Marchand 1968, Kastovsky 1992, Park 2018a). The purpose of this paper is to investigate Old English pleonastic compounds and offer a descriptive and statistical analysis of their semantic patterns. I found 222 examples of pleonastic compounds in Old English and analyzed different types of semantic relationship between two members of a compound or between the compound and its members. Main findings of this analysis can be summarized as follows: (i) There are two types of the semantic relation between two elements of the OE pleonastic compounds: entailment relationship (50.9%) and synonymous relationship (49.1%); (ii) The meaning of an OE pleonastic compound is synonymous with either one of its elements (57.2%) or both (42.8%); (iii) In the case of the entailment relationship, there is a strong tendency for the first member to entail the second (88.5%); (iv) In a majority (95%) of examples showing the synonymous relationship, two members and their combination are synonymous with each other.
1. Introduction
2. Previous Works on Pleonastic Compounding
3. OE Pleonastic Compounds
4. Summary and Conclusion