Peculiar distributional features of synonyms

2.4 Peculiar distributional features of synonyms

Synonymic pairs like wear and tear are very numerous in modern English and often used both in everyday speech and in literature. They show all the typical features of idiomatic phrases that ensure their memorable ness such as rhythm, alliteration, rhyme and the use of archaic words seldom occurring elsewhere.

The examples are numerous: hale and hearty, with might and main, nevertheless and notwithstanding, modes and manners, stress and strain, rack and ruin, really and truly, hue and cry, wane and pale, without let or hindrance, act and deed. There are many others which show neither rhyme nor alliteration, and consist of two words equally modern. They are pleonastic, i. e. they emphasize the idea by just stating it twice, and possess a certain rhythmical quality which probably enhances their unity and makes them easily remembered. These are: by leaps and bounds, to pick and choose, pure and simple, stuff and nonsense, bright and shining, far and away, proud and haughty and many more.

In a great number of cases the semantic difference between two OP more synonyms is supported by the difference in valence. Distributional oppositions between synonyms have never been studied systematically, although the amount of data collected is very impressive. The difference in distribution maybe syntactical, morphological, lexical, and surely deserves more attention than has been so far given to it. It is, for instance, known that bare in reference to persons is used only predicatively while naked occurs both predicatively and attributively. The same is true about alone, which, irrespectively of referent, is used only predicatively, whereas its synonyms solitary and lonely occur in both functions. The function is predicative in the following sentence: you are idle, be not solitary, if you are solitary be not idle. (s. JOHNSON)[8] It has been repeatedly mentioned that begin and commence differ stylistically, ft must be noted, however, that their distributional difference is not less important. Begin is generalized in its lexical meaning and becomes a semi-auxiliary when used with an infinitive. It follows naturally that begin and not commence is the right word before an infinitive even in formal style. Seem and appear may be followed by an infinitive or a that-claw. see whereas look which is stylistically equivalent to them is never used in these constructions. Aware and conscious are followed either by an o/-phrase or by a subordinate clause, e. g. to be aware of one’s failure, to be aware that one’s failure is inevitable. Their synonym sensible is preferably used with an o/-phrase.

Very often the distributional difference between synonyms concerns the use of prepositions: e. g. to answer a question, but to reply to a question. The adjectives anxious and uneasy are followed by the preposition about, their synonym concerned permits a choice and is variously combined with about, at, for, with. The misuse of prepositions is one of the most common mistakes not only with foreigners but with native speakers as well.

Lexical difference in distribution is based on the difference in valence. An example of this is offered by the verbs win and gain. Both may be used in combination with the noun victory: to win a victory, to gain a victory. But with the word war only win is possible: to win a war. We are here trespassing on the domain of set expressions, a problem that has already been treated in an earlier chapter. Here it will suffice to point out that the phraseological combining possibilities of words are extremely varied.

It has been repeatedly stated that synonyms cannot be substituted into set expressions; as a general rule each synonym has its own peculiarities of phraseological connections. The statement is only approximately correct. A. V. Koenig has shown that set expressions have special properties as regards synonymy, different from those observed in free phrases. l Some set expressions may vary in their lexical components without changing their meaning, e. g. cast (fling or throw] smth in smb’s. teeth. Moreover, the meaning may remain unchanged even if the interchangeable components are not synonymous: to hang on by one’s eyelashes (eyelids, eyebrows),-to bear or show a resemblance. The nouns glance, look and glimpse are indiscriminately used with the verbs give and have: to give a look (a glance, a glimpse), to have a look (a glance, a glimpse). With (he verbs “cast arid take the word glimpse is not used, so that only the expressions to cast a glance (a look) or to take a glance (a look) are possible. With the verbs steal, shoot, throw the combining possibilities are further restricted, so that only the noun glance will occur in combination with these. It goes without saying that phraseological interchangeability is not frequent.

2.5 Peculiar features of semantic combinability of synonyms

The verbs which fall into one synonymous row, can possess the miscellaneous character of composing restrictions. The composing restrictions can be of lexical, semantic or referring character.

The lexical restriction reveals in the following fact: a synonym can be used only with determined circle of words. However, the verbal synonyms practically do not possess such type of restrictions, though there are some examples which might be suitable, to some degree, to the given type of restrictions:

For example, if we analyze the two synonyms - «to creep” and “to crawl”, the latter, is more preferable in usage with the names of animals who are deprived with limbs (e.g. Snakes, gophers, etc.)

Cf: The snakes crawled around the tree.

Contrary to the above mentioned character, the semantic restriction is assigned by denotation of determined semantic feature, which a synonym must possess when correlating in syntactical relationship with the given word.

For instance, in the synonymic row «to escape”, “to flee”, “to fly”, “to abscond”, “to decamp” in the meaning of “избегать” the first three synonyms possess a broad combinability, than the last twos. That is, in the case of semantic combinability the subject of the corresponding actions are both people and animals.

Cf. :His best tow dogs escaped from the camp, the dog fled into the forest.

Meanwhile, the subject action of the verbs “to abscond” and “to decamp” are only people.

More complicated than the previously mentioned groups are the synonyms with the referring combinability restrictions. The example of such restrictions can be shown on the following synonymic row: “to reach” - “to achieve” - “to gain” - “to attain” in the meaning of “добавляться” The following noun expressions which denote the purpose or the result of the action are of typical character for these three synonyms:

To reach / to achieve, to gain, to attain /one’s aim ( e,g. the abject of one’s desires, success, fame, glory), “to reach (an understanding, agreement), “to achieve the reputation for being rude”, “to achieve the realization of a dream”, “to gain / to attain / the attention of the clerk [ the confidence of the mountain people]. It should be borne in the mind that the last examples the verbs “to gain” and “to attain” mustn’t be substituted onto the verbs “”to reach”, or “to achieve”, because the noun expression “to reach / to achieve / the attention of the clerk [the confidence of the mountain people] are wrong (and not only somewhat different in the meaning).

Supervising more attentively to the nouns “attention” and “confidence”, which are capable to enter in the place of the direct object in the sentences with the verbs “to gain” and “to attain”, but not as the direct object to the verbs “to reach” and “ to achieve, we may notice the following interesting peculiar feature of the studied synonymical phrases: the subject for the state, marked by the words “attention” or “confidence”, do not correspond to the subject of the action, marked by the verbs “to gain” and “ to attain”, i.e. the attention of the clerk is attracted not by the clerk himself , but by the other person, and the confidence of highlanders is achieved by someone different from highlanders.

However, the verbs “to gain” and “to attain” are capable to match with the nouns, marking such conditions (the characteristics, situations), the subjects of which coincide with the subjects of actions corresponding to these subjects: that is in the case of the verbs “to gain / to attain / one’s aim [success, glory]” the subject of the action of “to gain / attain” is one and the same person.

So now we can formulate the referring restriction for the verbs “to reach” and “to achieve”: they cannot be combined with the names of conditions, the subjects of which do not coincide with the subject of the action marked by these conditions.

The similar difference is presented in the pair of the synonyms “to condescend” - “ to deign” ( in the meaning of “снисходить”): the first of them is combined both with the name of the action or property, the subject of which coincides with the subject for the verb “ to condescend” (e.g. he condescend smile); and with the name or state the subject of which does not coincide with the subject for the verb “to condescend” (cf.: to condescend to smb’s folly). Meantime, the verb “to deign” can be combined in its meaning only with the names of the proper actions or the characteristics of the subject:

Cf.: He didn’t deign to smile, he didn’t deign to their folly.

The differences in combinability between the synonyms can, like constructive differences, be motivated or non-motivated.

Let us take into consideration, for instance, the synonyms “to surprise” - “удивлять” and “to amaze”, “to astound” - изумлять”,”поражать”. They differ, in particular, on the feature of degree of a feeling. All the three synonyms can be combined with the adverbial modifiers of measure, but the verb “to surprise” can be combined with any circumstance of this class (cf.: he was a little [not a little, very much] sup), while “to amaze” and “to astound” can be combined only with those adverbial modifiers of measure, which mark the super high or the maximal degree of property, condition or feeling.

At least once unusual unless absolutely anomalous, word-combinations.

In the above mentioned case the differences in combinability are naturally removed from the differences in the meanings of synonyms. However, even the differences in combinability can be semantically non-motivated.

Below we shall take into consideration some more several examples of differences in combinability between the synonyms.

The verb “gather” “собираться” differs from their synonyms “to assemble” and “to congregate” by the following: the subject for the verbs “to assemble” and “to congregate” can only be (in stylistically neutral text) only the living beings, but the subject for the verb “to gather” - can be expressed by any moving things: e.g. The clouds are gathering, it will rain.

The verbs “to ponder”, “to meditate» and “to ruminate” in the meaning of “размышлять” are combinable with the names of situation, characteristic, products of thoughts as object (the theme) of reflections:

cf.: to ponder / to meditate/ upon the course of actions; to ruminate over the past; to ponder / to meditate, to ruminate/ the point.

The verbs “to ponder” and “to meditate” are combinable with the names of the person as object for reflections; the latter is characterized for the verb “to ruminate”:

cf.: to ponder on modern young men, he meditated on all those people and the things they represented in his life.

The verbs “to depress”, “to oppress” and “to weigh down (upon)” in the meaning of “угнетать” can be combined with the names of feelings, actions, characteristics, etc. as the reasons for the oppressed condition:

cf.: a feeling of isolation depressed / oppressed / her, she was oppressed by fear, oppressed / weighed down / by the heat. Besides, the verbs “to depress” and “to oppress” can be combined with the names of the concrete things and living beings in same meaning, which is not characteristic for the phrasal verb “to weigh down (upon)”:

Cf.: the dim room depressed / oppressed / her, she depressed me.[9]

The problems of semantics on - former call the rapt attention to themselves by the leading scientists of the whole world. At the modern stage of development of linguistically science the important meaningfulness is gained both in the questions of the determination and revision of the background notions of semasiology, and the narrower problems of the concrete studies which are finally also directed on solving of the global philosophical problems of the correlation between the language, thinking and reality.

We analyze this chapter from the viewpoint of the Russian philologist E.V.Drozd. According to this work E.V. Drozd has denoted the study of the semantics and the peculiarities of the combinability of the English verbs “to amuse”, “to entertain”, “to grip”, “to interest”, “to thrill”

The given group of verbs was chosen not accidentally. The verbs “to amuse”,” to entertain”, “to grip”, “to interest”, “to thrill” reflects the important social and psychological notions, connected with intellectual - cognitive and emotional sphere of human activity and this group differs in a rather big frequency of its usage. The interest to this group is also undutiful from the purely a linguistically standpoint because of its extent semantic structure, and the various possibilities for combinability.

Proceeding with the concrete procedure of analysis of semantic composition of the given verb, we put the following problems before ourselves:

1) clearly delimit and describe the verbal word as a nominative and structured unit of the language, to analyze the peculiarities of the semantic structure of each verb and match them;

2) to install on the base of semantic composition what the subject of the name comprises in itself: only the main verbal component of action, condition, motion or it comprises the accompanying features: the manner, the source, the purpose - and to compare the verbs on this parameters.

In our study we used the method of vocabulary definition, by means of which the set of seams of the given lexical importance was analyzed, and any vocabulary mark was taken for instruction on semantic component. The observations show that the vocabulary definition comprises in itself, on the one hand, the instruction on attribute to the more general semantic area, but, on the other hand, - the enumeration of individual semantic features of a word. Uniting the synonymous, (excluding the rare cases of usage) we have got the set of components for the meaning of each investigated verb (See: Table 1).

The Analysis shows that the general component for all the investigating verbs is a seam “to affect the emotions”, which gives us, as we seem, the right to refer the considered verbs to the category of the emotional ones. It is Interesting to note that no even one of the dictionaries, describing the meaning of the verbs “to amuse” and “to entertain”, gives the word “emotion” as such, but the presence of the component “joy”, “happiness”, “revelry” (purely emotional features) allows us to fix the presence of the component “to affect the emotions” in these verbs as well.

The general component for four from five considered verbs a was the following: “ to engage” and “keep the attention”. According to the investigations, this element in miscellaneous degrees is expressed in the meanings of the analyzed words in the following number: for “to amuse” it is fixed in 14, for “to entertain” - 11, for “to grip” - 19, for “to interest” - in 25 dictionaries. The component of meaning of the verb “to excite” is met in four from five verbs, that puts the verb “to trill” in somewhat specific position. The other components are of purely specific character.

As conclusion, we may say that the verb, as no other part of speech, has a broad set of differential features, vastly complicating the semantics of it.

In the meaning of a verb there might be a denotation to the specifying of the denoted actions, to the conditions of persons, subjects, ways, types of the action, correlations to its communicators, modality of the content assignment of the utterance, time of the speech act, etc.

So, we say that two words are synonymous if substituting one for the other in all contexts does not change the truth value of the sentence where the substitution is made. Synonymy dictionaries include something that native speakers have very clear intuitions about. They have the intuition that a number of words may express the same idea.

Ex: You can find ‘kill’ as a synonym of ‘murder’, and ‘strong’ as a synonym of ‘powerful’, but not the other way round:

When you say they A and B are synonymous because they express the same object, you expect also that if A is synonymous of B, B is also synonymous of A. but this isn’t reflected in dictionaries. If A is a synonym of B and B is a synonym of A, these are true or absolute synonyms. They are interchangeable. But there are no absolute synonyms, it’s an intellectual creation. Native speakers feel that some pairs of synonyms are more synonymous than others. This gives us the idea of a scale of synonymy. Obviously, the idea behind synonymy is that of sharing meaning that is that two words share (part of) their meaning. It has become a problem to establish how much overlapping do we need for two words for being considered synonyms.

Ex: truthful: honest they are synonyms although they share only part of their meaning; truthful: purple they are not at all synonyms.

E. Cruse says that an important thing here is contrast. When a speaker uses them indistinctively, he emphasizes their similarities not their differences.

Ex: kill: murder they share part of their meaning

The greater the number of features two words share, the more synonyms they are.

A and B share almost all of their meaning components.

Ex: - creature animal dog + Alsatian philosophy tree cat Spaniel.

Alsatian’ and ‘Spaniel’ share more atoms of meaning than creature’ and ‘philosophy’ but they are not synonyms. So this claim is wrong, because we need two things for synonymy: we need overlapping of meaning and, at the same time, the two words do not have to be contrastive.

Cruse says that synonyms must not only share high degree of semantic overlapping but also a low degree of implicit contractiveness. So, a high degree of semantic overlap results in a low degree of implicit contrast.

Ex: - John is honest

John is truthful

He was cashiered, that is to say, dismissed.

He was murdered, or rather executed

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