“Naming names”: Descriptive or redundant?

The phrase naming names arises often during the reporting of corruption investigations, political scandals or the like. The word naming is defined as citing by name or giving a name to. I could not think of any similarly redundant phrase for comparison.

Is this phrase merely an alliterative embellishment, or does it say more than a replacement phrase such as naming of implicated individuals would imply?

Solution 1:

Macmillan agrees with your supposition that naming names means naming of implicated individuals:

name names

to state publicly the names of people involved in something dishonest or illegal

Other sources note that name names is an idiom; you can play the same game with other words, but the resulting phrases would be more literal in meaning:

• link links (link hyperlinks, naturally)
• game games (rig or otherwise cheat at games)
• like likes (enjoy your accumulated upvotes on Facebook)

There are many other such examples.

Solution 2:

Some verbs (in at least some of their senses) take (perhaps only) objects that are etymologically related to the verb: cognate objects.

cognate object (noun) [Grammar]: a substantive functioning as the object of a verb, especially of a verb that is usually intransitive, when both object and verb are derived from the same root.

( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cognate+object )

Thus you can only dream - a dream. You can dance a dance or sing a song, but here hyponymous objects are also possible - dance a tango; sing a lullaby. Sing a song sounds a lot better than dance a dance, of course, but it's just a matter of prosody. Variants on naming names don't sound too bad nowadays because they've become accepted usages. Of course, name, unlike dream or dance, is transitive.