A Syntactic Study of Tautology in Talk Shows

Abstract

Tautology is a statement that is necessarily true in every situation. In this statement one says the same thing twice .It is uninformative by itself ,but it becomes meaningful  in context ,example ”war is war” .The study aims at investigating syntactic tautologies in talk shows .It tries to find out if such constructions are used in programmes as a kind of discourse text .It also aims  to find out which kind is most prominent .The analysis is based on Ward and Hirschberg (1991)and Autenrieth’s (1997) general account for the construction of tautological expressions .The study comes with the conclusion that tautology  are used in talk shows ,and that equative is most used among other forms.