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.
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
2.6 The link of synonymy with collocational 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.
2.7 The notion of 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)[10]
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’)[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.