“It is not easy to see why her memory should have faded, especially as she wrote a most readable / *legible autobiography which went quickly through several editions.”
Legible; readable; able to with pleasure; be read' and /or; interest.
They share senses number 1 but to `readable' it's also added sense number 2. This claims that in some contexts they are fully interchangeable, but we have also to take into account their stylistic feature and the register.
In principle, scientific words have discrete meanings.
Ex: mercury: quicksilver
They appear as full synonyms because they say that their relationship is that of mutual inclusion (A-B)
Conceptually, the concept `mercury' can be expressed with both words. However, style draws the line between both words. Native speakers and corpora of data give us what we have in the following figure:
Mercury: formal, quicksilver; scientific whitish; fluid informal; metal.
Mercury formal, scientific (Romance origin): Quicksilver informal (Saxon origin)
However something peculiar has happened with this words. The popular word `quicksilver' is starting to disappear and what usually happens is that the formal words are the one that disappears. But in this case, it is the contrary.
Cigarette: fag
Cigarette fag
Tube with
General tobacco in slang'
It for smoking' `narrow, made of finely cut tobacco rolled in thin paper'
This figure contains not only CC but typical attributes too.
2.9 SYNONYMY AND COLLOCATIVE 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.
2.10 SEMANTIC PECULIARITIES OF SYNONYMS
Semantic fields are the answer to the problem / question of structuring the lexicon of a language. Those who defend the existence of semantic fields believe that the language is structured. They say that the words can be classified in sets, which are related to conceptual fields and these words divide the semantic space / domain in different ways. It's to be preferred that the label to use here is field rather than theory because theories are supposed to be complete and have explicit definitions of the matter in question, and this isn't what happens in the semantic field approach. We just have ideas of how things seem to be. Moreover, the semantic field approach isn't formalized and it was born on the basis of just a handful of ideas of how words work.
The basic notion behind any semantic field approach is the notion of association: words are associated in different words. We also have the idea of a mosaic. The words form it in such a way that for it to be complete you need all the words in their correct place. We also have to distinguish between lexical and semantic fields. Semantic fields have something to do with prototypically. One of the main difficulties in the semantic field approach is to establish the exact number of words that are part of a set. Here is where Prototype Theory enters because it defines the basic features of a category.
Model of focal points.
Martin and Key concluded that the basic words of a category are very easy to identify by a native speaker but they say that the interesting point is the area a native speaker doubts whether to call something A or B. There are concepts which cannot be expressed in words. From the psychological point of view there are concepts which cannot be verbalized but that really exist in the mind. The aim of this model is to identify the relationship between the lexical fields and the semantic fields. And there are fields where the relationship doesn't exist.
The idea behind semantic fields is the arrangement of words in sets depending on the organizing concepts. Many semantic linguists say that it's difficult to think of a word outside a semantic field because if you say that a word is outside a semantic field, you say it's outside the lexicon. The problem with this is what happens with words which don't evoke a concept. Many words in English are meaningful but don't have a concept
Ex: Even / only
These words clearly make a semantic contribution to the sentence. It's not the same to say: Only John drinks milk. Then: Even John drinks milk.
CONCLUSION
3.1 SUMMARY TO THE WHOLE WORK
So, the conclusion is that some words of a language don't lend themselves well to the analysis in terms of semantic fields. Other important idea is the difficulty of finding finite sets of words. In any case, there's an internal contradiction between the ideas of a set with the structuring of words of a language. A set is a close set. A word can belong to several fields depending on the organizing concept. Speakers of the language clearly identify the central example but not the peripheral ones. This doesn't mean that it would never happen that. The degree of flexibility in the discrepancy of the categorization of words is smaller.
Ex: Please give me some more tables (`Table' is here a mass noun meaning `space in a table').
E.G. Two races are grown in India. Here two races' refers to `two types of rice'
The idea behind this is that the dynamic character of a vocabulary cannot be reflected in the static character of the semantic fields, which are a static way of organizing the vocabulary of a language.
3.2 WAYS OF APPLYING THE WORK
Having analyzed the problem of synonymy in Modern English we could do the following conclusions:
a) The problem of synonymy in Modern English is very actual nowadays.
b) There are several kinds of analysis of synonyms: semantical, stylistic and componentional.
c) A number of famous linguists dealt with the problem of synonymy in Modern English. In particular, Profs. Ullmann and Broal emphasized the social reasons for synonymy, L. Lipka pointed out non-binary contrast or many-member lexical sets and gave the type which he called directional opposition, V.N. Comissarov and Walter Skeat proved the link of synonymy with other kinds of lexical devices.
d) The problem of synonymy is still waits for its detail investigation.
Having said about the perspectives of the work we hope that this work will find its worthy way of applying at schools, lyceums and colleges of high education by both teachers and students of English. We also express our hopes to take this work its worthy place among the lexicological works dedicated to synonymy.
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1978 pp. 23-24, 117-119, 133-134
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29 Internet: http://www.wikipedia.com/English/articles/synonyms.htm
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31. Internet:http://www.freeessays.com/english/E.Cruse Quantiitive and Qualitive synonymy.htm
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