合肥着力推进住房租赁试点

Question

I came across a sentence while doing a grammar exercise about 定语. This exercise's prompt is to underline and correct a grammar mistake in each sentence.

Original sentence: 这里的高楼的大厦高级了.

Corrected sentence (from the answer key): 这里的高楼大厦高级了.

Isn't 大厦 a tall building already? Why is 高楼 used as its 定语? Is this natural in Chinese, or is this a word redundancy?

Answer 1

A building can be tall but relatively smaller than a mansion; on the other hand, a mansion/large building is usually large but not necessarily tall.

高楼 - a tall building.

大厦 - mansion; large building

高楼大厦 - large and tall buildings

Note, I think the answer would sound better if modified as "这里的高楼大厦太高级了." or "这里的高楼大厦真高级."

Answer 2

Not a grammar expert but imo 高楼 is not really a word that describes 大厦. Chinese has many such words in the form of AB (or XAYB in your case) which A and B are both nouns of similar meaning. Classical Chinese was quite stingy about characters which one character means a thing by itself but in modern Chinese the AB words are not uncommon. Fox example, 书本 both meaning books (本 itself is still commonly used in Japanese as book), 菜肴 both meaning dishes (菜 literally veggie but has the meaning of dish which is commonly used too like 一道菜）.

Technically you could argue 高楼 and 大厦 are not the same thing but nowadays they're often used interchangeably. I believe it's better to accumulate such collocations through ample reading and listening input than delving into grammar details.