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’)¹¹

     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.

 

      1.8. 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.

 

      1.9. 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.

 

      Chapter 2. Substantival synonymic rows and ways of their translation into Ukrainian.

 

     The existence of lexical synonymy in language sets the special task for interpreter. Absolute synonyms are very few. In addition, synonyms can not always substitute each other. They may be appropriate in one context and be useless in another. When analyzing and selecting one of the synonyms it is necessary to identify synonyms:

• semantic (ideographic) which have different shades of meaning, expressing the notion of degree of intensity;
• stylistic, which differ in emotional coloring or attitude to different styles;
• phraseological, that differ in their compatibility with other words

 

     Usually in the bilingual dictionary synonyms, representing various shades of meaning and values ​​of words are separated by Arabic numerals, semicolon, comma.

     As an example of semantic differentiation of synonyms let’s analyze ‘design’  article in the English-Ukrainian dictionary by M.I. Ball:

     design 1. n 1) задум; намір, план; 2) часто  pl злий намір (умисел); 3) рел. боже провидіння; 4) мета; 5) творчий задум, проект; 6) креслення. ескіз, конструкція; 7) малюнок, візерунок; 8) дизайн; композиція; 9) твір мистецтва 

     As we can see, in the synonymic row 1) meanings намір and план are separated by comma, and задум and намір by semicolon. The first two of these synonyms, obviously, are closer in meaning than the second pair. In all other ranks of synonymous (except 8) synonyms are similar in meaning. 

     For comparison of semantic and stylistic synonyms let’s analyze dictionary entry ‘delay’ from the same dictionary: