Abstract This paper examines a special pattern of tautological constructions – a is a and b is b – in Spanish and Russian. The phenomenon was first described by A. Wierzbicka, who cited Rudyard Kipling’s “East is East and West and West,” referring to it as “double tautologies” with the associated meaning of “irreducible difference.” Later, J. Meibauer called this pattern “coordinated tautologies” (CT) and suggested that they carry the implicature that “the referents of the respective subject NPs should be kept distinct, should not be confused, etc.” In the present study, we address the issue of compositionality in the construction and interpretation of CT. The data taken from Spanish and Russian corpora listed in the appendix and an Internet survey conducted with 91 native Spanish speakers prove that “irreducible difference” is not a necessary ingredient in the interpretation of and-conjoined tautologies, nor is it its only argumentative point. We also argue that “irreducible difference” is not associated with this pattern alone (it can also appear in tautologies linked by the conjunction but, or without any conjunction) and that the exact number of conjuncts is not limited to two. Later, we discuss how exactly the frequent contrastive interpretation arises. Finally, we conclude that coordinated tautologies are not fixed form/function pairs; rather, the meaning they encode can be accounted for in regular compositional terms, and their different interpretations are the result of pragmatic enrichment in which the encoded meaning is combined with contextual information.

中文翻译：

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西班牙文和俄文的重言式

摘要本文研究了西班牙语和俄语中一种重言式构造的特殊模式-a是a和b是b。A. Wierzbicka首先描述了这种现象，他引用了Rudyard Kipling的“东方是东方，西方和西方”，称其为“双重重言式”，并具有“不可减少的差异”的含义。后来，J。Meibauer将此模式称为“协调重言式”（CT），并建议它们带有这样的含义：“各个主题NP的参照对象应保持区分，不应混淆，等等。” 在本研究中，我们解决了CT的构造和解释中的组成性问题。附录中列出的来自西班牙和俄罗斯语料库的数据以及与91位西班牙裔母语人士进行的互联网调查证明，“不可减少的差异”不是解释和关联重言式的必要成分，也不是唯一的论点。我们还认为，“不可减少的差异”并不仅仅与这种模式相关联（它也可以出现在通过连词链接的重言式中，但是也可以不存在任何连词），并且合词的确切数量不限于两个。稍后，我们将讨论频繁的对比解释是如何产生的。最后，我们得出结论，重言式不是固定的形式/功能对。相反，它们编码的含义可以用常规的构成用语解释，