Synonym

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Synonym list in cuneiform on a clay tablet, Neo-Assyrian period Library of Ashurbanipal synonym list tablet.jpg
Synonym list in cuneiform on a clay tablet, Neo-Assyrian period

A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. [2] For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous. The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be replaced by another in a sentence without changing its meaning. Words are considered synonymous in only one particular sense: for example, long and extended in the context long time or extended time are synonymous, but long cannot be used in the phrase extended family. Synonyms with exactly the same meaning share a seme or denotational sememe, whereas those with inexactly similar meanings share a broader denotational or connotational sememe and thus overlap within a semantic field. The former are sometimes called cognitive synonyms and the latter, near-synonyms, [3] plesionyms [4] or poecilonyms. [5]

Contents

Lexicography

Some lexicographers claim that no synonyms have exactly the same meaning (in all contexts or social levels of language) because etymology, orthography, phonic qualities, connotations, ambiguous meanings, usage, and so on make them unique. [6] Different words that are similar in meaning usually differ for a reason: feline is more formal than cat; long and extended are only synonyms in one usage and not in others (for example, a long arm is not the same as an extended arm). Synonyms are also a source of euphemisms.

Metonymy can sometimes be a form of synonymy: the White House is used as a synonym of the administration in referring to the U.S. executive branch under a specific president. [7] Thus, a metonym is a type of synonym, and the word metonym is a hyponym of the word synonym.[ citation needed ]

The analysis of synonymy, polysemy, hyponymy, and hypernymy is inherent to taxonomy and ontology in the information science senses of those terms. [8] It has applications in pedagogy and machine learning, because they rely on word-sense disambiguation. [9]

Etymology

The word is borrowed from Latin synōnymum, in turn borrowed from Ancient Greek synōnymon ( συνώνυμον ), composed of sýn ( σύν 'together, similar, alike') and -ōnym- (-ωνυμ-), a form of onoma ( ὄνομα 'name'). [10]

Sources

Synonyms are often some from the different strata making up a language. For example, in English, Norman French superstratum words and Old English substratum words continue to coexist. [11] Thus, today we have synonyms like the Norman-derived people, liberty and archer, and the Saxon-derived folk, freedom and bowman. For more examples, see the list of Germanic and Latinate equivalents in English.

Loanwords are another rich source of synonyms, often from the language of the dominant culture of a region. Thus, most European languages have borrowed from Latin and ancient Greek, especially for technical terms, but the native terms continue to be used in non-technical contexts. In East Asia, borrowings from Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese often double native terms. In Islamic cultures, Arabic and Persian are large sources of synonymous borrowings.

For example, in Turkish, kara and siyah both mean 'black', the former being a native Turkish word, and the latter being a borrowing from Persian. In Ottoman Turkish, there were often three synonyms: water can be su (Turkish), âb (Persian), or mâ (Arabic): "such a triad of synonyms exists in Ottoman for every meaning, without exception". As always with synonyms, there are nuances and shades of meaning or usage. [12]

In English, similarly, we often have Latin (L) and Greek (Gk) terms synonymous with Germanic ones: thought, notion (L), idea (Gk); ring, circle (L), cycle (Gk). English often uses the Germanic term only as a noun, but has Latin and Greek adjectives: hand, manual (L), chiral (Gk); heat, thermal (L), caloric (Gk). Sometimes the Germanic term has become rare, or restricted to special meanings: tide, time/temporal, chronic. [13]

Many bound morphemes in English are borrowed from Latin and Greek and are synonyms for native words or morphemes: fish, pisci- (L), ichthy- (Gk).

Another source of synonyms is coinages, which may be motivated by linguistic purism. Thus, the English word foreword was coined to replace the Romance preface. In Turkish, okul was coined to replace the Arabic-derived mektep and mederese, but those words continue to be used in some contexts. [14]

Uses

Synonyms often express a nuance of meaning or are used in different registers of speech or writing.

Various technical domains may employ synonyms to convey precise technical nuances.

Some writers avoid repeating the same word in close proximity, and prefer to use synonyms: this is called elegant variation. Many modern style guides criticize this.

Examples

Synonyms can be any part of speech, as long as both words belong to the same part of speech. Examples:

Synonyms are defined with respect to certain senses of words: pupil as the aperture in the iris of the eye is not synonymous with student. Similarly, he expired means the same as he died, yet my passport has expired cannot be replaced by my passport has died.

A thesaurus or synonym dictionary lists similar or related words; these are often, but not always, synonyms. [15]

See also

Related Research Articles

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Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that analyzes the lexicon of a specific language. A word is the smallest meaningful unit of a language that can stand on its own, and is made up of small components called morphemes and even smaller elements known as phonemes, or distinguishing sounds. Lexicology examines every feature of a word – including formation, spelling, origin, usage, and definition.

A thesaurus, sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings, sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea:

...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WordNet</span> Computational lexicon of English

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In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new lexeme in the target language. For instance, the English word "skyscraper" has been calqued in dozens of other languages, combining words for "sky" and "scrape" in each language. Another notable example is the Latin weekday names, which came to be associated by ancient Germanic speakers with their own gods following a practice known as interpretatio germanica: the Latin "Day of Mercury", Mercurii dies, was borrowed into Late Proto-Germanic as the "Day of Wōđanaz" (Wodanesdag), which became Wōdnesdæg in Old English, then "Wednesday" in Modern English.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Semantic lexicon</span>

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References

  1. ↑ K.4375
  2. ↑ "Synonym | Definition, Meaning, & Examples". Britannica.
  3. ↑ Stanojević, Maja (2009), "Cognitive synonymy: a general overview" (PDF), Facta Universitatis, Linguistics and Literature Series, 7 (2): 193–200.
  4. ↑ DiMarco, Chrysanne, and Graeme Hirst. "Usage notes as the basis for a representation of near-synonymy for lexical choice." Proceedings of 9th annual conference of the University of Waterloo Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary and Text Research. 1993.
  5. ↑ Grambs, David. The Endangered English Dictionary: Bodacious Words Your Dictionary Forgot. WW Norton & Company, 1997.
  6. ↑ "In the strictest sense, synonymous words scarcely exist". Standard Dictionary (Funk & Wagnalls, 1894), entry for synonyms or synonymous, as quoted in Webster's New Dictionary of Synonyms: A Dictionary of Discriminated Synonyms with Antonyms and Analogous and Contrasted Words (Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam (Merriam-Webster ser.), [4th ed.] 1973 (SBN 0-87779-141-4)), p. 19a (Survey of the History of English Synonymy, in Introductory Matter); accord, Webster's New Dictionary of Synonyms, id., pp. 23a–25a, passim (Synonym: Analysis and Definition (titular word & colon italicized in original & subtitle not), in Introductory Matter).
  7. ↑ "World Architecture Images – The White House". essential-architecture.com. Retrieved 2019-12-09.
  8. ↑ Hirst, Graeme. "Ontology and the lexicon." Handbook on ontologies. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009. 269-292.
  9. ↑ Turney, Peter D. (2008). "A Uniform Approach to Analogies, Synonyms, Antonyms, and Associations". Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics – Volume 1. COLING '08. Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, US: Association for Computational Linguistics: 905–912. arXiv: 0809.0124 . ISBN   978-1-905593-44-6.
  10. ↑ Oxford English Dictionary , 1st edition, 1919, s.v.
  11. ↑ Bradley, Henry (1922). The Making of English. Macmillan and Company, Limited.
  12. ↑ Ziya Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 1968, p. 78
  13. ↑ Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, 1949, reprinted as ISBN   0226079376
  14. ↑ Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success, 1999, ISBN   0198238568, p. 44, 70, 117
  15. ↑ "Synonym dictionary words and phrases". www.allacronyms.com. Retrieved 2018-04-27.
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