[Lexicog] Re: synonymy

[Rudolph C Troike]

Many thanks to John Roberts for the detailed information from COBUILD. I
would still suggest that many of the examples where "big" is appropriate
as opposed to "large" are more informal, colloquial examples. (One could
similarly argue that "father:daddy" are not synonyms based on a usage such
as "sugar daddy/*father".) Large corpora are certainly valuable for
ferreting out usages that would not necessarily come to mind via
introspection, but most corpora do not tag words/expressions or even texts
for degree of formality/informality or "register", so that the computer
cannot identify these differences (it certainly COULD, if the input were
appropriately tagged). I would guess that a frequency count of "big" vs
"large" would show a much higher frequency for the former in a spoken
corpus (especially if formal speeches were excluded), and for the latter
in a written corpus (again especially if it excluded dialogue in fiction
and sports writing).
	My initial point was that second-language learners often don't
know enough about the register nuances of such (near-)synonyms, and so use
the more common or basic word they have been taught, in inappropriate
contexts for formal academic prose.
	One interesting example where presumably the logical entailments
would be identical, but not the sociolinguistic evaluation, would be in

	I don't have anything.
	I ain't got nothing.

By this test, these would be synonymous (except to those Victorian
textbook writers who still concur with Bishop Lowth that the latter means
"I have something").

	Rudy Troike




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