Is there a redundancy in "Repeat again again"?

English as a Second Language English Vocabulary, Grammar and Idioms
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Is there a redundancy in “Repeat again and again”?

Thanks.

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Actually, there is (1) and there isn’t (2).

    • ‘repeatedly’ and ‘again and again’ are synonyms.
  • E.g.: - She mentioned his name again and again/ repeatedly/ over and over the entire time I was there.
  • E.g.: - She kept on mentioning his name the entire time I was there.
    • E.g.: - She kept on repeating his name. (Is also acceptable, because I’ve heard it used plenty of times.) to keep on doing something = to continue doing something and repeating is the same.
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It is terribly REDUNDANT.
I agree with Marc.

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Thank you, Lawrence.

Indeed, it is. Even in my native language people tend to use so many synonyms - redundancy - and I just wanted to make clear, that although it’s considered to be wrong, the message is usually accepted when it’s clear-cut. However, when speakers of Dutch do that, it sometimes irritates me. Yet, I’ve heard the sentence in (2) used, that’s why I wrote ‘there is and there isn’t’. Allow me to explain why. A lot native speakers of Dutch make mistakes using diminutives. I’ll give you an example in English:

  • Either you say: ‘a piglet or a little pig’, in Dutch this would be: ‘een big/ biggetje’ or ‘een klein varken’ and in German, if I’m not mistaken: ‘Ein Ferkel’ or ‘Ein kleines Schwein or Schweinchen’.
    Too many words can make a book and speech very tiring to read or to listen to. Eventually, it gets so boring that you start yawning and before you know it you’ve fallen asleep.
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It’s difficult to work with fragments of a sentence.
I’m not sure how this works in the present tense. It seems to work better in the past tense.

“She warned them. She repeated her warning. She repeated it again and again.”
Here she has warned them at least 4 times, probably more.

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I would rephrase your last sentence as follows: ‘She warned them again and again’.
However, I don’t think we should make such a big deal out of it, because people will use synonyms leading to redundancy all the time.
It’s also a fact that pleonasms and tautologies are useful for emphasizing a particular point, even though they are considered to be stylistic errors. Today, there are many - what I call - ‘fossilized pleonasms and tautologies’ that are acceptable. They mostly occur in conversational and written speech like novels and poems. Yet, I would recommend avoiding them when writing a formal text like a dissertation.

I’m sorry if I rewrote my text again and again.

P.S.: Dont mix up pleonasm and tautology: pleonasm: more words than necessary to express a meaning and tautology: two words or phrases having the same meaning. :grinning:

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I agree. I don’t see anything wrong with “again and again”. But in formal writing it’s bad form and should be avoided. There are better ways to express the same thing.

This reminds me of the Latin term.
Repeat again and again and again ad nauseam.

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ad nauseam: repeated so many times that it makes people annoyed, disgusted, or bored. The term has been in use since the 1600s.

Oh, I forgot to mention that double negations are also a form of redundancy, however, in French, for example it is very common and grammatically correct, even though there is growing tendency to use a single negation:

  • ne…jamais: never - Je n’ai jamais vu quelque chose comme ça. [double negation ] (I’ve never seen anything like that/ it) - J’ai jamais vu quelque chose comme ça. [single negation] (meaning is the same as the first).
  • ne…pas: not - Je ne l’ai pas vu. [double negation] (I haven’t seen him) - Je l’ai pas vu. [single negation] (same meaning as the first.)

Yet, you can find double negations in formal and informal speech in every language:

  • I ain’t done nothing wrong, sir.
  • You ain’t seen nothing yet!
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