Redundancy and Contradiction in Arabic: Non Intended, Non Functional, and Potentially Humorous

This study is a qualitative investigation of special cases of redundant and contradictory expressions in Jordanian Arabic (JA) where the speakers are unaware of the redundancy or contradiction they are using. It is this lack of awareness, we assume, that deprives the expressions of any semantic or pragmatic contribution to the communication event. The data used in this study includes observation of the speech of individuals in various naturalistic settings. In addition, a wide range of social media posts and comments, advertisements and television content are gathered, categorized, and analysis. We analyse the data with reference to the semantic notions of componential analysis and entailment and then categorized. On the one hand, results reveal that unintended redundancies involved either message repetition or entailment. On the other hand, some redundancies are found to lend themselves to negation while others do not. Contradictions are analyzed with reference to the notion of logical incompatibility. Some contradictions are found to be subject to negation while others are not. Results also highlight that such redundancies and contradictions may result in humor unintended by the speaker and only captured by a language critic. This contrasts with other genre-specific humor where humor is intended by the speaker and understood by those who share that genre.