The notion of conceptual synonymy

Words are felt to be synonymous independently of their contextual relations. Leech makes the distinction between synonymy and conceptual synonymy. The equivalence of meaning of synonymy has to adhere to the equivalence of concepts, independently from the stylistic overtones.

Ex: Steed (poetic) Horse (general) Nag (slang) Gee-gee (baby language)[10]

The concept ‘horse’ is evoked by these words. So these words are synonymous although they are different in their stylistic overtones. This has been strongly criticized because to prove that we all have the same concept is very doubted. Our system of conceptualization may be different from one speaker to other. The most evident example of this is baby language. When a baby says gee-gee he may be saying it to any animal that moves.

So conceptual synonymy is alright but it has faults and objections.

Warwick says that it isn’t possible to distinguish semantic meaning and factual meaning. Her lexicographic descriptions are very lengthy because she has into account all knowledge of the world that is, the habitat, size, appearance, behavior, and relation to people…

Componential analysis of conceptual synonymy.

It is an analysis very popular in the 1970’s and turned itself to be very useful in the identification of atoms of meaning of words. One of the applications of componential analysis is in the identification of synonyms, because if two words share atoms of meaning, they are synonymous.

Ex: John is a bachelor

John is an unmarried man

Componential analysis serves quite well for the analysis of fairly uncompleted words (nouns, adjectives, some verbs), but there are whole areas of the vocabulary of the language that don’t lend themselves for componential analysis.

Barbara Warren makes a distinction between synonyms and variants. She says that we have synonyms if the words have similar meaning and if they are interchangeable without affecting meaning in some context or contexts. Variants are words which have similar meaning but without the interchangeability in some contexts.

Ex: extending Deep far below; profound the surface.

‘Deep’ and ‘profound’ has always been considered synonyms and it’s true they are interchangeable but it’s also true that in some contexts one cannot replace the other.

He had a deep / profound understanding of the matter

This river is deep / profound. They are not interchangeable in this context.

Ex: Sweet: candy dialectal variants

Decease: pop off stylistic variants

Lady: woman connotative variants

In one context you use one word and in the other you use the other one.

Human 1) lady adult woman 2) female’

The point here is to try and prove that synonyms exist. The result of this research is quiet distressing. There are no synonyms following Warren’s definition. What Person did was to scrutinize the use of ‘deep’ and ‘profound’. His research is especially valid because he bases his research on lexicographic words, corpus data and importance. The wide range of sources and the number of them is what makes this valid.

The conclusions: ‘Deep’ and ‘profound’ show a difference in collocability, that is, they tend to collocate with different words. Deep tends to collocate with words of affection, conviction, feeling, regret, satisfaction, sorrow… Whereas ‘profound’ tends to collocate with words of difference, distaste, effect, failure, influence… They enter different collocations because they mean slightly different things. They specialize in certain areas of meaning and that makes them slightly different. He also talks about metaphorical status. Metaphorically speaking, they can mean position on the one hand or quality of depth on the other. Only ‘deep’ enters for the position metaphor, but the quality of depth can be expressed by both of them.

Ex: deep structure (profound structure)

He was deep (profound) in thought

It was deep (profound) in the Middle Ages

Deep / profound learning

Deep / profound sleep

Intellectual - emotive dichotomy: ‘deep’ and ‘profound’ tend to relate respectively to intellectual and emotive words. The idea is that ‘deep’ tends to collocate with emotive nouns, whereas ‘profound’ tends to collocate with intellectual words.

There is a difference in the degree of depth and intensity of these words. ‘Profound’ is deeper that ‘deep’. When both are possible, then there is a distinction.

Ex: He has a deep understanding of the matter (‘pretty good’)

He has a profound understanding of the matter (‘very good’)[11]

English words associations give us a very useful way to prove this. There are nouns whose inherent meaning is superlative. With such a noun you can only have ‘profound’ because it means deeper.

Ex: profound distaste *deep distaste

Profound repugnance *deep repugnance

Of course in terms of truth-conditions one entails the other one but not vice versa, that is ‘profound’ includes ‘deep’ but not vice versa.

Ex: His profound insight into human nature has stood the test of centuries

His deep insight into human nature has stood the test of centuries.

His deep insight into human nature has stood the test of centuries. *

His profound insight into human nature has stood the test of centuries

Synonymy is understood within mutual entailment (A-B) but ‘deep’ and ‘profound’ doesn’t correspond to this. Native speakers feel that ‘profound’ is stylistically more elevated or more formal that deep? So with all this evidence it is impossible to say that they are synonymous. This is why Person gives the following figure as the analysis for them.

Concrete ‘situated, coming abstract; abstract from, or extending intellectual; emotive far below the strongly; surface emotive.

Stylistic Attributes (SA): informal SA; formal.

In Person’s model we have three categories: CC, TA, SA. The thing is that not all words include SA box, so it’s left open. Person also reviewed other examples analyzed by Warren.

Ex: child / brat child CC brat TA

Child’ and ‘brat’ are an example of connotative variant in Warren. They are given as variants but if we apply the test of hyponymy we see that it works. ‘Brat’ is a kind of ‘child’ but not vice versa. ‘Brat’ includes ‘child’ plus the feature ‘bad-mannered. Person finds the collocation in which ‘brat’ appears; it tends to appear with adjectives that reinforces this feature of bad-mannered what proves that that atom of meaning (…)

The same happens with ‘woman’ and ‘lady’.

Ex: She is a woman, but she is not a lady.

She is a lady, but she is not a woman

Person questions the fact that two words can be synonymous out of the blue. He defends contextual information as the key to determine if two words are synonymous or not.

Ex: readable: legible

At to what extent can we say that they are synonyms?

•   readable:

(of handwriting or point) able to be read easily’

pleasurable or interesting to read’

•   legible:

(of handwriting or print) ‘able to be read easily’

They are only synonymous when they mean ‘able to be read easily’

“The child, quite obviously, would not be expected to produce a composition, but would be expected to know the alphabet, where the full stops and commas are used, and be able to write in a readable / legible manner, something like, ‘The cat sat on the mat’.”

“It is not easy to see why her memory should have faded, especially as she wrote a most readable / *legible autobiography which went quickly through several editions.”

Legible; readable; able to with pleasure; be read’ and /or; interest.

They share senses number 1 but to ‘readable’ it’s also added sense number 2. This claims that in some contexts they are fully interchangeable, but we have also to take into account their stylistic feature and the register.

In principle, scientific words have discrete meanings.

Ex: mercury: quicksilver

They appear as full synonyms because they say that their relationship is that of mutual inclusion (A-B)

Conceptually, the concept ‘mercury’ can be expressed with both words. However, style draws the line between both words. Native speakers and corpora of data give us what we have in the following figure:

Mercury: formal, quicksilver; scientific whitish; fluid informal; metal.

Mercury formal, scientific (Romance origin): Quicksilver informal (Saxon origin)

However something peculiar has happened with this words. The popular word ‘quicksilver’ is starting to disappear and what usually happens is that the formal words are the one that disappears. But in this case, it is the contrary.

Cigarette: fag

Cigarette fag

Tube with

General tobacco in slang’

It for smoking’ ‘narrow, made of finely cut tobacco rolled in thin paper’

This figure contains not only CC but typical attributes too.

CONCLUSION