Synonymy

5 Key excerpts on "Synonymy"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Development of the Concept of SMELL in American English

  A Usage-Based View of Near-Synonymy

  • Daniela Pettersson-Traba(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  2  Synonymy

  In the introductory chapter Synonymy was defined as a relation of identity of meaning between two or more words or word senses. However, it was claimed that a less strict definition is more suitable for this semantic relation, as words are rarely – if ever – completely identical in meaning. In fact, different types of synonyms can be distinguished depending on which aspects of meaning they share, i.e., whether they match only in denotative meaning or whether they coincide also in other dimensions, such as connotation, style, and/or collocation (cf. Section 2.1 below). This implies that different degrees of Synonymy exist, and it appears to be the case that competent language users have an intuition about some words or word senses being more synonymous than others (e.g., Lyons 1968 : 447; Cruse 1986 : 265–268). Even within a specific set of synonyms, speakers commonly have the feeling that some members of a synonym set share more semantic features than others and can thus be interchanged in more contexts of use. However, although Synonymy is typically defined and viewed as a semantic relation of similarity, it is also crucial to consider the differences between synonymous words in order to provide a comprehensive picture of the semantic relation that holds between them. This is so because, as has already been pointed out, a great majority of synonyms, despite being semantically similar in one or more aspects, also differ in other respects, which prevents them from being freely interchangeable when used.

  Once the focus shifts from concentrating solely on the similarities to considering also the level of contrast between synonymous words, it becomes evident that the way in which synonyms differ from each other varies from synonym set to synonym set, as well as from synonym to synonym. Edmonds (1999 : Chapter 3) claims that there are at least 35 ways in which synonyms can differ and provides evidence of the complex and intriguing nature of Synonymy. In fact, research on Synonymy has been and continues to be a rich field of study in many areas of linguistics, including lexicography (e.g., Atkins and Levin 1995 ; Bergenholtz and Gouws 2012 ; Murphy 2013 ), computational linguistics (e.g., Edmonds 1999 ; Edmonds and Hirst 2002 ; Inkpen and Hirst 2006 ), and language learning and teaching (e.g., Martin 1984 ; Xiao and McEnery 2006; Liu and Zong 2016

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  eBook - ePub

  Introduction to English Linguistics

  • Ingo Plag, Sabine Arndt-Lappe, Maria Braun, Mareile Schramm(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  5.1. :

  Fig. 5.1: Polysemy, homonymy and Synonymy

  In our discussion of Synonymy we have then seen that this is a difficult concept. Many linguists assume that true Synonymy does not exist; word pairs which we may consider to be candidates for Synonymy turn out to be only near-synonyms upon closer inspection. Using some examples, we saw that near-synonyms indeed exhibit subtle meaning differences, and that meaning equivalences between lexemes usually do not include all meanings of polysemous lexemes. Finally, near-synonyms often differ in terms of the registers in which they may be used.

  5.5 Conclusion

  In this chapter we have looked at the linguistic discipline which is concerned with the meaning of linguistic expressions: semantics. We saw that meaning is a relational property which describes the relation between the form of a linguistic expression and a mental concept. This relation needs to be distinguished from the relation which links linguistic expressions and mental concepts to the objects (or events or situations) that we talk about, which is described in linguistics in terms of reference and denotation.

  Concerning the question of which kinds of linguistic expressions can have meaning, we saw that meaning arises on different levels. Depending on whether the meaning of a linguistic expression involves the combination of the meanings of parts of that expression, we distinguish between compositional and non-compositional types of meaning. Non-compositional meaning can be found in morphologically simplex words and in morphemes. Compositional meaning can be found in morphologically complex words as well as in larger syntactic constituents such as phrases and sentences. The compositional meaning of a linguistic expression can be decomposed into the meanings of the parts of that expression. Interestingly, we saw that in such complex expressions the semantic scope of some elements (e.g. inflectional suffixes) may pertain to the whole expression. Furthermore, we saw that it is necessary to distinguish compositional semantic meaning from pragmatic meaning.

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  Everyday Linguistics

  An Introduction to the Study of Language

  • Joanne Cavallaro(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 7 Semantics Relationships among words

  DOI: 10.4324/9780429269059-7

  First glance

  • How do we mean things with words?
  • Reference, sense, and meaning
  • Semantic relations:

  • Synonymity, slurs, and euphemisms
  • Antonymity, complementarity
  • Hyponymy
  • Homonymy and polysemy

  • Figurative language:

  • Metaphors: Do tables have legs?
  • Metonymy: Can a House, even a White one, talk?
  • Idioms: Who’s pushing up what daisies?

  • Semantic fields, semantic roles

  INTRODUCTION

  In this chapter, we’ll turn our attention to semantics, the study of how we construct and understand the meanings of words and sentences. For a word, that might seem like a straightforward endeavor: Just look it up in the dictionary; that’ll tell you what a word means. Well, yes and no. The dictionary definition never tells the whole story of a word’s meaning. And words help construct the meaning of a sentence by the roles they play in it.

  MEANING AND MEANINGS

  We can start by asking what it is we know when we know a word. Clearly, we know how to pronounce or sign it; how to use it in a sentence; how to use it appropriately in discourse; how to use it non-literally ( freeze to mean stop as well as to make something frozen). What is not so obvious is that our knowledge includes much more than that: what other words it is related to; what affective connotations it has; what social meaning it carries, and more.

  The concepts of reference and sense can help us begin to differentiate various aspects of word meaning. Reference (also called referential meaning) is the association of the word with the object or concept it refers to; that object or concept is the word’s referent. This type of meaning is most easily seen in words that refer to objects or individuals: the car, her cat, that sandwich, Michelle Obama, my teacher in fifth grade. Not all words, not even all nouns, refer to specific objects or individuals, however. Take the following sentence: Preparing to become a teacher takes years. In that sentence, teacher has a related but not identical meaning to its meaning in the phrase, my teacher in fifth grade. In the former, there is an additional element to the meaning, something broader and more abstract, not referring to any one teacher. Sense

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  Dimensions of Diffusion and Diversity

  • Janice Fon, Janice Fon(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Miller, George A., and Christiane Fellbaum. “Semantic networks of English.” Cognition 41.1-3 (1991): 197–229.

  Milroy L. & Gordon M. 2008. Sociolinguistics: Method and interpretation 13 .

  Moon R. 2013. Braving Synonymy: From Data to Dictionary. International Journal of Lexicography 26(3). 260–278.

  Murphy G. & Andrew J. 1993. The conceptual basis of antonymy and Synonymy in adjectives. Journal of Memory and Language 32. 301–319.

  Murphy M. 2013. What We Talk about When We Talk about Synonyms (And What it can tell us About Thesauruses). International Journal of Lexicography .

  National Languages Committee. 1998. xin ci yu liao hui bian I [Collection of NeologismsI]. Taipei: Ministry of Education.

  Norde M. 2002. The final stages of grammaticalization: Affixhood and beyond. In W. Diewald, Typological Studies in Language . 45–81.

  Petrov, Slav, Dipanjan Das, and Ryan McDonald. “A universal part-of-speech tagset.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1104.2086 (2011).

  Plag I. 2006. Productivity. In The handbook of English linguistics . 537–556.

  Plag, Ingo. “Productivity.” The handbook of English linguistics (2006): 537–556.

  Polguere A. 2014. From Writing Dictionaries to Weaving Lexical Networks. International Journal of Lexicography .

  Renouf A. 2013. A finer definition of neology in English: the life-cycle of a word. Corpus perspectives on patterns of lexis . 177–207.

  Renouf, Antoinette (2013) A finer definition of neology in English: The life-cycle of a word. In: Corpus Perspectives on Patterns of Lexis. Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 57. John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 177–208. ISBN 9789027203632

  Rey A. 1995. The Concept of neologism and the evolution of terminologies in individual languages. In In Essays on Terminology . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

  Romagnoli C. 2013. The Lexicographic Approach to Modern Chinese Synonyms. International Journal of Lexicography 26 (4). 407–423.

  Rosch E. 1973. On the internal structure of perceptual and semantic categories. In T. E. Moore, Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Language

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  A Concise Introduction to Linguistics

  • Bruce M. Rowe, Diane P. Levine(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Lexical semantics deals with the meaning of words. There is a lexicon or dictionary in each person’s brain that contains the definitions of all the words the person knows. The referent of each word is the concrete object or abstract concept to which the word refers. Semantic properties are the elements of meaning that make up the mental image of the word in the mind of the speaker. Semantic properties can be analyzed using the + and − system of semantic property analysis. Words that share semantic properties can be considered members of a semantic domain. Markedness, the concept that some members of a semantic domain are more common or usual than others, gives us an idea of how the native speakers of a language think about their world.

  Words that are similar to each other in meaning or in sound are hyponyms, synonyms, homonyms, and antonyms. Hyponyms are words that form a subclass of another word. Words that have similar meanings, that share the same semantic properties, are called synonyms. These are words that sound different but mean the same. Synonyms have the same denotation, or dictionary definition, but different connotations, or shades of meaning. In contrast to synonyms, homonyms (or homophones) are words that sound the same but have very different meanings. Polysemous words have more than one meaning. Words that have the opposite meaning are called antonyms, which can be classified as complementary pairs, gradable pairs, and relational opposites.

  Structural semantics is the study of how the structure of sentences contributes to meaning. Some special topics studied in structural semantics are contradictions, utterances in which the semantic properties of one word do not match with those of another; oxymorons, phrases that combine contradictory words; and anomalous utterances in which the semantic properties of the words involved don’t match. Other topics are metaphors, in which two dissimilar items are symbolically considered to be similar to each other; and idioms, utterances in which there is a contradiction between the meaning of the parts of the utterance and the entire utterance.

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