Page 410 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes in the creation of a new lexical word, adding to homonymy, but mostly it just adds another sense
to the words and leads to more polysemy.
The vocabulary of a language contains a number of lexical systems the semantic structure of
which can be described in terms of paradigmatic and syntagmatic sense-relations, or name-sense
relationship which can be divided into five categories :
1. Synonymy
2. Hyponymy and Incompatibility
3. Antonymy, Complementarity and Converseness
4. Polysemy
5. Homonymy

32.1 Synonymy

One sense with several names is synonymy, that is two items are synonymous when they have the
same sense. Lexical items can be regarded as synonymous if they can be interchanged without
altering the meaning of an utterance :
e.g. I saw a madman.
I saw a lunatic.
I saw a maddy.
I saw a bedlamite.
According to John Lyons, the term ‘synonymy’ has two interpretations—a stricter and a looser.
The looser interpretation has been illustrated by him by means of a quotation from Roget’s Tesaurus
: “Suppose we take the word ‘nice’. Under it (in the Index) we will see..... various synonyms
representing different shades of meaning of the word ‘nice’ ”. The ‘synonyms’ given for nice in die
Index are savoury, discriminative, exact, good, pleasing, fastidious and honourable. All these
words and expressions are ‘synonymous’ with nice under the looser interpretation of the notion
of synonymy.

32.2 Qualification of Synonymy

It is often suggested that synonymy is a matter of degree; that any set of lexical items can be
arranged on a scale of similarity and difference of sense, so that, for example a and b might be
shown to be identical in sense (strictly synonymous), a and c relatively similar in sense (loosely
synonymous), a and d less similar in sense, and so on’ (Lyons, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics.

32.3 ‘Total Synonymy’ and ‘Complete Synonymy’

Dr. Johnson once remarked, ‘words are seldom exactly synonymous’. Macaulay also observed :
‘Change the structure of the sentence; substitute one synonymy for another and the whole effect
is destroyed’. To quote Ullmann : ‘it is almost a truism that total synonymy is an extremely rare
occurrence, a luxury that language can ill-afford’. “Only those words”, says Ullmann, “can be
described as synonymous which can replace each other in any given context without the slightest
change either in cognitive or emotive import”. The two conditions for ‘total synonymy’ are threrefore
(i) interchangeability in all contexts, and (ii) identity in both cognitive and emotive import. We
will discuss the validity of the distinction between ‘cognitive’ and ‘emotive’ below. On the basis of
this distinction, Lyons restricts the term total synonymy to those synonyms (whether complete or
not) which are interchangeable in all contexts; and used the complete synonymy for equivalence
of both cognitive and emotive sense. This scheme of classification allows for four possible kinds of
synonymy :

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