Redundant pleonasms can emphasize or clarify meaning. Syntactic pleonasms, like the word “that” in English, are grammatically unnecessary. Pro-drop occurs in languages like Spanish where pronoun subjects are often dropped.
Another purpose of redundant pleonasms might be to use them for emphasis. For example, planning ahead may be considered pleonasm because planning usually happens before a project, but the speaker may want to emphasize that planning has not been left to the last minute. Also, if a speaker wants to avoid confusion with another use of the same word, he can add pleonasm to create better clarity. The potentially redundant phrase invited guests makes it clear that guests are invited, rather than uninvited or surprise guests.
Syntactic pleonasms are typically words or phrases that are grammatically unnecessary for the sentence. A common example of this in English is the word that. In some contexts, removing this word will not change the meaning of the sentence. For example, in the sentence I know she works for you, the word that can be removed without changing the grammatical structure of the sentence.
Another example of syntactic pleonasm is the dropped subject that occurs in many languages of the world. In Spanish, a language that has verbs with subject-mirroring inflections, pronoun subjects are often made unnecessary. The pronoun is then dropped. This is a language event called pro-drop.
An example of a pro-drop is found in the Spanish phrase meaning yo te amo. A literal translation is ti amo but it actually means I love you in English. In Spanish it is typically abbreviated to te amo, which translates to English as you love. The verb in the sentence, amo has the suffix ‘-o’ which shows that it refers to a first person singular subject, or yo. Yo is made pleonastic and can therefore be dropped.
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