И. В. Арнольд лексикология современного английского языка Издание

clown, abandon, — which is in the vulgar leave, — the society, — which in the boorish is company, — of this female, — which in the common is woman; which together is abandon the society of this female, or, clown, thou perishest; or to thy better understanding diest; or, to wit, I kill thee, make thee away, translate thy life into death.

The general effect of poetic or learned synonyms when used in prose or in everyday speech is that of creating an elevated tone. The point may be proved by the very first example in this paragraph (see p. 194) where the poetic and archaic verb slay is substituted for the neutral kill. We must be on our guard too against the idea that the stylistic effect may exist without influencing the meaning; in fact it never does. The verb slay not only lends to the whole poetical and solemn ring, it also shows the writer’s and his hero’s attitude to the fact, their horror and repugnance of war and their feeling for the victims.

The study of synonyms is a borderline province between semantics and stylistics on the one hand and semantics and phraseology on the other because of the synonymic collocations serving as a means of emphasis.

Synonymic pairs like wear and tear, pick and choose are very numerous in modern English phraseology and often used both in everyday speech and in literature. They show all the typical features of idiomatic phrases that ensure their memorableness such as rhythm, alliteration, rhyme and the use of archaic words seldom occurring elsewhere.

The examples are numerous: hale and hearty, with might and main, nevertheless and notwithstanding, stress and strain, rack and ruin, really and truly, hue and cry, wane and pale, act and deed. There are many others which show neither rhyme nor alliteration, and consist of two words equally modern. They are pleonastic, i.e. they emphasise the idea by just stating it twice, and possess a certain rhythmical quality which probably enhances their unity and makes them easily remembered. These are: by leaps and bounds, pure and simple, stuff and nonsense, bright and shining, far and away, proud and haughty and many more.

In a great number of cases the semantic difference between two or more synonyms is supported by the difference in valency. The difference in distribution may be syntactical, morphological, lexical, and surely deserves more attention than has been so far given to it. It is, for instance, known that bare in reference to persons is used only predicatively, while naked occurs both predicatively and attributively. The same is true about alone, which, irrespectively of referent, is used only predicatively, whereas its synonyms solitary and lonely occur in both functions. The function is predicative in the following sentence: If you are idle, be not solitary, if you are solitary, be not idle (S. Johnson). It has been repeatedly mentioned that begin and commence differ stylistically. It must be noted, however, that their distributional difference is not less important. Begin is generalised in its lexical meaning and becomes a semi-auxiliary when used with an infinitive. E. g.: It has begun to be done — it has been begun. If follows naturally that begin and not commence is the right word before an infinitive even in formal style. Seem and appear may be followed by an infinitive or

199

a that-clause, a hill of a hundred metres is not high. The same relativity is characteristic of its antonym low. As to the word tall, it is used about objects whose height is greatly in excess of their breadth or diameter and whose actual height is great for an object of its kind: a tall man, a tall tree. The antonym is short.

The area where substitution is possible is very limited and outside it all replacement makes the utterance vague, ungrammatical and even unintelligible. This makes the knowledge of where each synonym differs from another of paramount importance for correctness of speech.

The distinction between words similar in meaning are often very fine and elusive, so that some special instruction on the use of synonyms is necessary even for native speakers. This accounts for the great number of books of synonyms that serve as guides for those who aim at good style and precision and wish to choose the most appropriate terms from the varied stock of the English vocabulary. The practical utility of such reference works as “Roget’s International Thesaurus” depends upon a prior knowledge of the language on the part of the person using them. N.A. Shechtman has discussed this problem on several occasions. (See Recommended Reading.)

The study of synonyms is especially indispensable for those who learn English as a foreign language because what is the right word in one situation will be wrong in many other, apparently similar, contexts.

It is often convenient to explain the meaning of a new word with the help of its previously learned synonyms. This forms additional associations in the student’s mind, and the new word is better remembered. Moreover, it eliminates the necessity of bringing in a native word. And yet the discrimination of synonyms and words which may be confused is more important. The teacher must show that synonyms are not identical in meaning or use and explain the difference between them by comparing and contrasting them, as well as by showing in what contexts one or the other may be most fitly used.

Translation cannot serve as a criterion of synonymy: there are cases when several English words of different distribution and valency are translated into Russian by one and the same word. Such words as also, too and as well, all translated by the Russian word тоже, are never interchangeable. A teacher of English should always stress the necessity of being on one’s guard against mistakes of this kind.

Contextual or context-dependent synonyms are similar in meaning only under some specific distributional conditions. It may happen that the difference between the meanings of two words is contextually neutralised. E. g. buy and get would not generally be taken as synonymous, but they are synonyms in the following examples offered by J. Lyons: I’ll go to the shop and buy some bread : : I’ll go to the shop and get some bread. The verbs bear, suffer and stand are semantically different and not interchangeable except when used in the negative form; can’t stand is equal to can’t bear in the following words of an officer: Gas. I’ve swallowed too much of the beastly stuff. I can’t stand it any longer. I'm going to the dressing-station (Aldington).

202

There are some other distinctions to be made with respect to different kinds of semantic similarity. Some authors, for instance, class groups like ask : : beg : : implore; like : : love : : adore or gift : : talent : : genius as synonymous, calling them relative synonyms. This attitude is open to discussion. In fact the difference in denotative meaning is unmistakable: the words name different notions, not various degrees of the same notion, and cannot substitute one another. An entirely different type of opposition is involved. Formerly we had oppositions based on the relationships between the members of the opposition, here we deal with proportional oppositions characterised by their relationship with the whole vocabulary system and based on a different degree of intensity of the relevant distinctive features. We shall not call such words synonymous, as they do not fit the definition of synonyms given in the beginning of the chapter.

Total synonymy, i.e. synonymy where the members of a synonymic group can replace each other in any given context, without the slightest alteration in denotative or emotional meaning and connotations, is a rare occurrence. Examples of this type can be found in special literature among technical terms peculiar to this or that branch of knowledge. Thus, in linguistics the terms noun and substantive; functional affix, flection and inflection are identical in meaning. What is not generally realised, however, is that terms are a peculiar type of words totally devoid of connotations or emotional colouring, and that their stylistic characterisation does not vary. That is why this is a very special kind of synonymy: neither ideographic nor stylistic oppositions are possible here. As to the distributional opposition, it is less marked, because the great majority of terms are nouns. Their interchangeability is also in a way deceptive. Every writer has to make up his mind right from the start as to which of the possible synonyms he prefers, and stick to it throughout his text to avoid ambiguity. Thus, the interchangeability is, as it were, theoretical and cannot be materialised in an actual text.

The same misunderstood conception of interchangeability lies at the bottom of considering different dialect names for the same plant, animal or agricultural implement and the like as total (absolute) synonyms. Thus, a perennial plant with long clusters of dotted whitish or purple tubular flowers that the botanists refer to as genus Digitalis has several dialectal names such as foxglove, fairybell, fingerflower, finger-root, dead men’s bells, ladies’ fingers. But the names are not interchangeable in any particular speaker’s ideolect.¹ The same is true about the cornflower (Centaurea cyanus), so called because it grows in cornfields; some people call it bluebottle according to the shape and colour of its petals. Compare also gorse, furze and whim, different names used in different places for the same prickly yellow-flowered shrub.