Linguistic misconceptions of tautology in the English second language context among student educators

Abstract

There is a misconception that tautology is an emphasis rather than a semantic error in English second language contexts. Subsequently, it is considered enablement for emphasis to disambiguate the meaning of the phrases and statements. This effect has been widely observed on different platforms of communication. Hence, the explicit purpose of this article is to linguistically identify and evaluate common illusions of tautology by English student educators in their academic writing. The researchers adopted the contrastive analysis theory as the theoretical point of departure to pursue the study’s aim. Furthermore, this article adopted a statistic descriptivism design embedded in the qualitative approach. The data for this study were collected through essay scripts from 30 purposively selected third-year English major students enrolled for a bachelor’s degree in education at the University of Venda. The researchers read and analysed the selected essay scripts for prevalent error tagging and classified them into error types. The findings of this study reported the following categories of redundancy errors exhibited: semantic redundancies, double comparatives, double superlatives, redundancy, and double negation. The major causes of redundancy errors are ascribed to fossilisation, ignorance of rule restrictions, overgeneralisation and false concepts hypothesised. Moreover, the key contribution of this article is addressing and changing the predominant misconception of semantic standard error through mitigating strategies. More attention needs to be paid to this area because tautology is considered stylish writing, while it is a semantic error.