[Lexicog] Re: Synonymy

[John Roberts]

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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