Ex: - John is honest
John is truthful
He was cashiered, that is to say, dismissed.
Cashiered' and `dismissed' are synonyms, while `murdered' and executed' are contrastive synonyms
Arthur's got himself a dog -or more exactly, a cat.
The inherent relationship between `cat' and `dog' is that of contrast, for that reason this sentence is odd.
It is impossible to put an end in the scale of synonyms.
Ex: + rap: tap rap: knock rap: thwack - rap: bang
They are not prototypical synonyms. They are peripheral synonyms
Behind any study of synonymy is the idea of the quest for the establishment of true synonyms. Cruse reviews some apparently true synonyms.
Ex: begin: commence munch: chew hate: loathe
Cruse takes into account the question of the contextual relations. For two words to be true synonymous we need two conditions: equivalence of meaning and equivalence of contextual relations. This is highly problematic because words don't behave like that. They tend to specialize in their contextual relations.
Ex: Begin and `commence' mean exactly the same but in terms of contextual relations they are not.
Johnny, tell Mummy when Playschool begins and she'll watch it with you.
Johnny, tell Mummy when Playschool commences and she'll watch it with you.
Arthur is always chewing gum (+)
Arthur is always munching gum (-)
I don't just hate him, I loathe him (+)
I don't just loathe him, I hate him (-)
Apart from this there are minus aspects we have to take into account
Syntax: two syntactic terms have to behave syntactically the same
Ex: Where is he hiding?
Where is he concealing?
Conceal' needs an argument (DO)
Johnny, where have you hidden Daddy's slippers? (+)
Johnny, where have you concealed Daddy's slippers? (-)
Sense: you have to choose the correct sense of the word if you want to prove that two words are synonymous.
Ex: Arthur's more recent car is an old one (+)
Arthur's most recent car is a former one (-)
He had more responsibility in his old job
He had more responsibility in his former job
2.6 The link of synonymy with collocational meaning
They have been considered similar in meaning but never fully synonyms. They belong to the same categorical concept
Collocations by Leech: girl, boy, woman, flower, pretty garden, color, village, etc.
Boy, man, car, vessel, handsome overcoat, airliner, typewriter, etc.
Collocations found in the Lob and the British Corpora:
Pretty, Batman, Case, Co-ed, Dress, Headdresses, Girl, Piece of seamanship, Quilt, Range of pram sets, Shoe, Shop, Sophie
Street: Teacher (female ref.), Trick, Woman, Handsome, Cocktail cabinet, Connor Winslow, Face (male ref.), Man, Mayor, Offer, Pair of salad servers, Person (male ref.),(Red brocade) curtains, Son, Staircase, Sub-Alpine gloom, Trees, Vessel, Volume (book), Woman, `pretty' female nouns, `handsome' male nouns.
This is the first division we could make but there are more differences. It cannot be based on terms of male / female words.
The idea, then, is that if an adjective tends to collocate to certain nouns means that its partner is slightly different to it. So when they are applied to the same noun, the same rule is applied.
Ex: pretty: handsome
Mary is a pretty woman
Mary is a handsome woman
A handsome woman is more elegant that a pretty woman. She also has stronger facial features. A handsome woman isn't a pretty woman at the same time and vice versa. So they are exclusive terms.
If they are exclusive terms, they are nor synonyms but co-hyponyms
If two items are closely synonymous, a coordination test will lead to a tautology.
Ex: Scientists have so far failed to find for this deadly and fatal disease.
However if we coordinate `pretty' and `handsome' what we have is a contradiction:
(Photocopy of definitions of `deep', `profound', `handsome', `lovely' and `beautiful')
Some of the dictionaries specialize it more deeply than others.
Profound' in the Longman is defined as deep but not vice versa. This also happens in `lovely' and `beautiful'.
Uninformative; it doesn't give really the sense of the words.
This isn't correct because `profound' emphasizes stronger that `deep' and this isn't true. There is a contradiction there.
Introduction of the notion of `delicacy' for defining a pretty woman.
This is the only dictionary which says that something pretty isn't something beautiful. They exclude each other. `Grand' is a feature of `handsome'.
handsome -`making a pleasant
lovely - impression on the pretty
senses' -beautiful
Here, `beautiful' and `pretty' appear as co-hyponyms so they have to exclude each other. The CC is actually the definition given for `beautiful', so it's the generic word for the four words. `Lovely' is slightly more intense than `beautiful'. (It's the same relationship `deep' and `profound' have)
This shows how language establishes degrees of intensity.
2.7 The notion of conceptual synonymy
Words are felt to be synonymous independently of their contextual relations. Leech makes the distinction between synonymy and conceptual synonymy. The equivalence of meaning of synonymy has to adhere to the equivalence of concepts, independently from the stylistic overtones.
Ex: Steed (poetic) Horse (general) Nag (slang) Gee-gee (baby language) “World Book Encyclopedia S part” Macmillan Publisher 1996 p 134
The concept `horse' is evoked by these words. So these words are synonymous although they are different in their stylistic overtones. This has been strongly criticized because to prove that we all have the same concept is very doubted. Our system of conceptualization may be different from one speaker to other. The most evident example of this is baby language. When a baby says gee-gee he may be saying it to any animal that moves.
So conceptual synonymy is alright but it has faults and objections.
Warwick says that it isn't possible to distinguish semantic meaning and factual meaning. Her lexicographic descriptions are very lengthy because she has into account all knowledge of the world that is, the habitat, size, appearance, behavior, and relation to people…
Componential analysis of conceptual synonymy.
It is an analysis very popular in the 1970's and turned itself to be very useful in the identification of atoms of meaning of words. One of the applications of componential analysis is in the identification of synonyms, because if two words share atoms of meaning, they are synonymous.
Ex: John is a bachelor
John is an unmarried man
Componential analysis serves quite well for the analysis of fairly uncompleted words (nouns, adjectives, some verbs), but there are whole areas of the vocabulary of the language that don't lend themselves for componential analysis.
Barbara Warren makes a distinction between synonyms and variants. She says that we have synonyms if the words have similar meaning and if they are interchangeable without affecting meaning in some context or contexts. Variants are words which have similar meaning but without the interchangeability in some contexts.
Ex: extending Deep far below; profound the surface.
`Deep' and `profound' has always been considered synonyms and it's true they are interchangeable but it's also true that in some contexts one cannot replace the other.
He had a deep / profound understanding of the matter
This river is deep / profound. They are not interchangeable in this context.
Ex: Sweet: candy dialectal variants
Decease: pop off stylistic variants
Lady: woman connotative variants
In one context you use one word and in the other you use the other one.
Human 1) lady adult woman 2) female'
The point here is to try and prove that synonyms exist. The result of this research is quiet distressing. There are no synonyms following Warren's definition. What Person did was to scrutinize the use of `deep' and `profound'. His research is especially valid because he bases his research on lexicographic words, corpus data and importance. The wide range of sources and the number of them is what makes this valid.
The conclusions: `Deep' and `profound' show a difference in collocability, that is, they tend to collocate with different words. Deep tends to collocate with words of affection, conviction, feeling, regret, satisfaction, sorrow… Whereas `profound' tends to collocate with words of difference, distaste, effect, failure, influence… They enter different collocations because they mean slightly different things. They specialize in certain areas of meaning and that makes them slightly different. He also talks about metaphorical status. Metaphorically speaking, they can mean position on the one hand or quality of depth on the other. Only `deep' enters for the position metaphor, but the quality of depth can be expressed by both of them.
Ex: deep structure (profound structure)
He was deep (profound) in thought
It was deep (profound) in the Middle Ages
Deep / profound learning
Deep / profound sleep
Intellectual - emotive dichotomy: `deep' and `profound' tend to relate respectively to intellectual and emotive words. The idea is that `deep' tends to collocate with emotive nouns, whereas `profound' tends to collocate with intellectual words.
Страницы: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
