A Pragmatic Analysis of Tautology

Tautology is a kind of special linguistic phenomenon which is a repetition or duplication of an idea using the words with the same meaning. Tautology seems to be pointless in the logical perspective but shows rich meaning on the pragmatic analysis. The focus of this paper is to present the pragmatic analysis on the basis of the Cooperative Principle, Conversational Implicature and Language Attitudes. That is, speakers violate the Cooperative Principle in the conversation and express certain language attitudes; while listeners try to obtain such conversational implicature depending on the specific context. In this case, the pragmatic value and effect of tautology become the focus of this article.