The problem of synonyms in modern English

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

 

 

1.8 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)

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.

There is a difference in the degree of depth and intensity of these words. ‘Profound’ is deeper that ‘deep’. When both are possible, then there is a distinction.

Ex: He has a deep understanding of the matter (‘pretty good’)

He has a profound understanding of the matter (‘very good’)

English words associations give us a very useful way to prove this. There are nouns whose inherent meaning is superlative. With such a noun you can only have ‘profound’ because it means deeper.

Ex: profound distaste *deep distaste

Profound repugnance *deep repugnance

Of course in terms of truth-conditions one entails the other one but not vice versa, that is ‘profound’ includes ‘deep’ but not vice versa.

Ex: His profound insight into human nature has stood the test of centuries

His deep insight into human nature has stood the test of centuries.

His deep insight into human nature has stood the test of centuries. *

His profound insight into human nature has stood the test of centuries

Synonymy is understood within mutual entailment (A-B) but ‘deep’ and ‘profound’ doesn’t correspond to this. Native speakers feel that ‘profound’ is stylistically more elevated or more formal that deep? So with all this evidence it is impossible to say that they are synonymous. This is why Person gives the following figure as the analysis for them.

Concrete ‘situated, coming abstract; abstract from, or extending intellectual; emotive far below the strongly; surface emotive.

Stylistic Attributes (SA): informal SA; formal.

In Person’s model we have three categories: CC, TA, SA. The thing is that not all words include SA box, so it’s left open. Person also reviewed other examples analyzed by Warren.

Ex: child / brat child CC brat TA

Child’ and ‘brat’ are an example of connotative variant in Warren. They are given as variants but if we apply the test of hyponymy we see that it works. ‘Brat’ is a kind of ‘child’ but not vice versa. ‘Brat’ includes ‘child’ plus the feature ‘bad-mannered. Person finds the collocation in which ‘brat’ appears; it tends to appear with adjectives that reinforces this feature of bad-mannered what proves that that atom of meaning (…)

The same happens with ‘woman’ and ‘lady’.

Ex: She is a woman, but she is not a lady.

She is a lady, but she is not a woman

Person questions the fact that two words can be synonymous out of the blue. He defends contextual information as the key to determine if two words are synonymous or not.

Ex: readable: legible

At to what extent can we say that they are synonyms?

•readable:

(of handwriting or point) able to be read easily’

pleasurable or interesting to read’

•legible:

(of handwriting or print) ‘able to be read easily’

They are only synonymous when they mean ‘able to be read easily’

“The child, quite obviously, would not be expected to produce a composition, but would be expected to know the alphabet, where the full stops and commas are used, and be able to write in a readable / legible manner, something like, ‘The cat sat on the mat’.”

“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.

 

 

1.9 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.

Pretty Street’ but ‘handsome avenue’

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:

That woman is pretty and handsome

(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.

 

 

1.10 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

 

 

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.

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.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

 

1.Ginzburg R.S. et al. A Course in Modern English Lexicology. M., 1979 pp.72-82

2.Buranov A. Muminov J. Readings on Modern English Lexicology T. O’qituvchi 1985 pp. 34-47

3.Arnold I.V. The English Word M. High School 1986 pp. 143-149

4.O. Jespersen. Linguistics. London, 1983, pp. 395-412

5.Jespersen ,Otto. Growth and Structure of the English Language. Oxford, 1982 pp.246-249

5.The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. Oxford 1964., pp.147, 167, 171-172

6.V.D. Arakin English Russian Dictionary M., RusskyYazyk

1978 pp. 23-24, 117-119, 133-134

7.Abayev V.I. Synonyms and their Semantical Features T. O’qituvchi 1981 pp. 4-5, 8, 26-29

8.Smirnitsky A.I. Synonyms in English M.1977 pp.57-59,89-90

9. Dubenets E.M. Modern English Lexicology (Course of Lectures)

M., Moscow State Teacher Training University Publishers 2004 pp.17-31

10. Akhmanova O.S. Lexicology: Theory and Method. M. 1972 pp. 59-66

12. Burchfield R.W. The English Language. Lnd. ,1985 pp45-47

13. Canon G. Historical Changes and English Wordformation: New Vocabulary items. N.Y., 1986.p.284