[Lexicog] Re: Synonymy

Sat Apr 16 02:07:25 UTC 2005

John has shown that 'big' and 'large' are interchangable in only the first 3 senses of the 15 listed in COBUILD. I find it interesting that it is the first three senses, which perhaps indicates that the central concept of this pair is the same or very similar, but that the pair are not synonymous in every case of extended usage. To illustrate the point, can we come up with any pair of words that are synonymous across 15 senses?

Would it be useful to say a pair of words are propositional synonyms when used in the same sense, but allow that they vary when different senses are used?

As a practical question: is it valid to list words as synonyms in a dictionary when they are interchangable in what appears to be the primary or achetypal sense, even though they may vary in extended usage? For example, 'pretty' and 'handsome' are propositional synonyms in their primary sense, but there are extended uses of pretty that are not interchangable with handsome, as in "Locking the keys in the car is a pretty stupid thing to do."

As an aside, we may agree on synonymous nouns more easily than other word classes because there may be less senses. I can only think of one sense for potassium nitrate:saltpetre.

Greg Mellow
Owa Dictionary Project
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: John Roberts 
  To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Saturday, April 16, 2005 8:23 AM
  Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Re: Synonymy

  Rudolph Troike wrote:

  > I was interested in Greg Mellow's mention of 'big' and 'large'. Like Greg,
  > I would consider them synonyms, but in the past several years I've had
  > occasion to note the use of 'big' in papers by non-native English speaking
  > grad students, and have somewhat compulsively felt the need to change it
  > to 'large', as 'big' seems stylistically inappropriate for formal writing.

  This suggests that 'big' and 'large' are propositional synonyms whose usage 
  distribution varies according to the stylistic context: formal or 
  colloquial. I disagree. I would analyse 'big' and 'large' as near synonyms 
  or plesionyms and not propositional synonyms.

  Propositional synonymy is based on the notion of truth conditions and can be 
  defined in terms of entailment. If two lexical items are propositional 
  synonyms they can be substituted in any expression with truth-conditional 
  properties without effect on those properties. To put things another way, 
  two sentences which differ only in that one has one member of a pair of 
  propositional synonyms where the other has the other member of the pair then 
  they are mutually entailing: 'Cedric bought a violin' entails and is 
  entailed by 'Cedric bought a fiddle' and 'I heard him tuning his fiddle' 
  mutually entails 'I heard him tuning his violin' 'She is going to play a 
  violin concerto' mutually entails 'She is going to play a fiddle concerto'. 
  In the last example 'fiddle' is less normal than 'violin', but the truth 
  conditions are still the same for both expressions. 'fiddle' and 'violin' 
  are propositional synonyms used in different stylistic contexts. The former 
  being a more informal or colloquial expression and the latter a more formal 
  expression.

  The differences in the meanings of propositional synonyms, by definition 
  necessarily involve one or more aspects of the non-propositional meaning, 
  such as the following: Expressive synonyms include items expressing 
  familiarity, evaluation, euphemism and taboo subjects. E.g. 'father:daddy' 
  (familiarity), 'horse:nag' (evaluative). Stylistic synonyms are used in 
  formal vs. colloquial contexts. E.g. 'conflagration:fire'. Domain of use 
  synonyms. E.g. scientific 'potassium nitrate:saltpetre', medical 
  'cardiac:heart', dialect 'elevator:lift', slang 'skint:broke', etc. Some 
  pairs of lexical items are normally contrastive and are only synonymous when 
  the contrast is neutralised. For example, the words 'pretty' ('female' 
  presupposed) and 'handsome' ('male' presupposed) both have the propositional 
  meaning of 'good-looking'. The semantic contrast between 'pretty' and 
  'handsome' is neutralised in an expression like 'Sam is pretty/handsome', 
  where you do not know if 'Sam' is short for 'Samuel' or 'Samantha'.

  Some pairs of lexical items, such as 'big:large', might look like synonyms 
  on first inspection but when their semantics are investigated more carefully 
  it can be seen that they are not propositional synonyms. When two words are 
  near synonyms of each other, if you exchange one for the other in an 
  expression the truth value of the expression will be different. Therefore 
  the rule of mutual entailment does not apply and they are not propositional 
  synonyms.

  For example, 'fog:mist' are listed as synonyms in Chambers Dictionary of 
  Synonyms and Antonyms. But if you extract their meanings from a dictionary 
  like NODE or COBUILD you will see that these words have a common major 
  property of meaning but also contrast minor properties of meaning. 
  Specifically, 'fog' and 'mist' are adjacent on a scale of transparency of 
  atmospheric conditions, as in

  least transparent < smog  -  fog  -  mist  -  haze > most transparent

  Therefore 'There is a thick fog outside' does not mutually entail 'There is 
  a thick mist outside'.

  A similar analysis can be conducted for 'large' and 'big'.

  The following senses for 'big' are listed in COBUILD:

  1. great in size
  a house big/large enough for family weekends

  2. great in number
  he got a big/large majority

  3. great in mass
  she was a big/large woman in her early forties

  4. = important, significant, serious
  I have noticed a big/*large change in Sue

  5. = important, influential
  he is big/*large in publishing

  6. = important, great
  you are making a big/*large mistake

  7. = grand, successful
  in a big/*large way

  8. = confident, proud
  big/*large ideas

  9. = boast, brag
  talk big/*large

  10. = large scale
  think big/*large

  11. = successful, famous
  made it big/*large

  12. = emphasis
  big/*large cheat, big/*large bully

  13. = older
  his big/*large brother

  14. = uppercase, capital letter
  big/*large letters

  15. = difficult
  big/*large word

  The following senses for 'large' are listed in COBUILD:

  1. great in size
  she had large/big black eyes
  large/*big areas of Asia

  2. great in number
  a large/?big number of people

  3. great in mass (person)
  one of those large/big bossy women

  4. great in quantity
  a very large/?big amount of money

  5. great in activity, business
  a large/?big advertising company

  6. = size in clothing
  small, medium and large/*big

  7. = important, vast
  the changes will not be very large/big

  8. by and large/*big

  9. at large/*big

  10. as large/*big as life

  From this you can see that 'large' and 'big' have a common majority meaning 
  of 'great in size:mass'. But beyond that there is a divergence in meaning. 
  Thus 'large' and 'big' are near synonyms and not propositional synonyms, 
  i.e. they do not denote the same meaning. Also none of the English 
  dictionaries I have consulted say 'large' is a formal synonym of 'big' nor 
  vice versa give 'big' as a colloquial synonym of 'large'.

  John Roberts 

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