3.Synonyms

A very import. Princip. of grouping words in a lang. is the synonymic princip. Accord. to similarity of meaning. A synonym is a word that has the same or nearly the same meaning as another word. Fast and quick are synonyms. Eng. is very rich in syn.. There are about 8,000 synonymic groups in Eng. "Having thrown its doors wide open to Latin and Romance loan words Eng. has greatly enriched its synonymic resources, Word borrowing, word derivation, and other processes keep going on all the time, making Eng. rich in syn. Since Eng. is considered to be a Ger. Lang. from a historical point of view, the Anglo-Saxon words are often considered to be "native" while those borrowed from other lang. are "foreign". The native words are often shorter and less learned, for ex.: buy and purchase. A characteristic pattern of Eng. synonymic sets is the pattern including the native and the borrowed word: begin (Native, neutral) - commence (French, between bookish and colloquial. Each synonymic group comprises the most general word in a given group of synonyms. For ex.: in the group of verbs to hope, to anticipate, to expect to hope is the most general word that stands for any of these words; it is called the synonymic dominant. It is the most general word in a given group of synonyms, a word belonging to the basic stock of words, stylistically neutral having high frequency of usage. Traditionally synonyms are described as words diff. in sound-form but identical or similar in meaning. It is not accurate to speak of synonyms as identical in meaning as the same range of idea may be very wide. We cannot apply these definitions to polysem. words -they cannot be synonymous in all their meanings. A polysem. word may enter as many groups as it has lexico-semantic variants, e.g.: to close - to finish, to close - to shut; Some sets of synonyms belong to different varieties of the language, e.g. fall and autumn. Some words are collocationally restricted, for example: both verbs win and gain may be used in comb. with the noun victory. But to win a war. In comparing synonyms we are more interested in their different denotational and connotational components of meaning that they express than in the similarity of their meaning. The semantic difference between synonyms is supported by the difference in valency and distribution. Valency is a permanent discrimination characteristic that always accompanies the differentiation in the semantic characteristics. Lexical synonyms are different words of the same part of speech having the same grammatical distribution, which have some common denot. components of meaning, but differ either in some denot. component(s) or in some connot. components of meaning and thus usually have different lexical valency. Synonyms are subdivided into different groups: a)ideographic: the difference in the meaning concerns the notion expressed: to walk - to pace - to stroll - to stride. b)Stylistic have the same denotational components but differ in connotational comp.: terrible-horrible-atrocious. Among stylistic synonyms we find archaic/modern (oft - often); neologisms/common (baby-moon - artificial satellite); British/American (post - mail); euphemisms (die - pass away).

English scholars speak also of absolute synonyms of exactly the same meaning (ash - ravan) and of phraseological synonyms which are used in different collocations: language -tongue (only mother tongue). There are also contextual synonyms that are similar in meaning under some specific distributional conditions (e.g. get and buy).

Many synonyms in the Eng. Lang. reflect the history of the formation of the Eng. Vocab. (hand-part-share;hand-handwriting).Contraction creates synonyms (comfortable-comfy). The sources of synonymy are borrowing, abbreviation, desynonymization and, in modern times, the formation of phrasal verbs (to turn down - to reject) The wealth of synonyms in Eng. gives us a variety of ways of expr. ourselves, but challenges us to decide on the most approp. of them.