Cognitive bases of lexical synonymy of nouns
The pertinence of this work stems from the need to study the cognitive bases of lexical synonymy of nouns, through which the semantic proximity between synonyms is formed for native speakers. Most of the works devoted to synonymy have been carried out within the framework of the systemocentric approach. This study tries to solve the problem: it studies synonymy in anthropocentric and cognitive aspects and it allows revising the traditional approach. The article aims to describe the cognitive bases of the synonymous similarity of different categories of Russian nouns. The linguistic materials for research are: 1) two psycholinguistic experiments (426 participants); 2) Russian National Corpus; 3) Russian dictionaries; 4) publications in the media. In the first experiment, subjects suggested synonyms for the stimuli; in the second experiment native speakers explained the meaning of the stimuli. The hypothesis is that logical and situational foundations create semantic proximity in the native speaker’s lexicon. The research has shown that the hypothesis was confirmed. According to the logical basis, the semantic similarity of synonyms is the result of the coincidence of most of the semantic components identified by using logical procedures: synonyms have the same core semantic components. This base is typical for object nouns. For situational basis, the semantic proximity is associated with the ability of synonyms to express similar situations from the point of native speaker’s view. The situation is understood broadly as a fragment of reality (scene) in which objects – people, objects, non-objective entities – are in certain relationships with each other. This basis is realized primarily for abstract nouns and personal names. The distinguished bases cannot always be clearly distinguished, especially for polysemantic words. Depending on the category of nouns and communicative strategy a native speaker can refine the meaning, using synonyms, or neutralize the differences between synonyms.
Belov, V. A. (2022). Cognitive bases of lexical synonymy of nouns, Research Result. Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, 8 (2), 3-23. DOI: 10.18413/2313-8912-2022-8-2-0-1
While nobody left any comments to this publication.
You can be first.
Apresjan, J. D. (2009). Issledovaniya po semantike i leksikografii: T. 1: Paradigmatika [Research on semantics and lexicography: Vol. 1: Paradigmatics], Yazyki slavyanskikh kul'tur, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Arutyunova, N. D. (2003). Predlozheniye i yego smysl (logiko-semanticheskiye problemy) [Sentence and its meaning (logo-semantic problems)], URSS, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Belov, V. A. (2018). Sposoby naivnogo tolkovaniya leksicheskogo znacheniya sushchestvitel'nykh [Ways of naive interpretation of the lexical meaning of nouns], Verkhnevolzhsk philological bulletin, 4, 83–91. (In Russian)
Berezhan, S. G. (1967). Sovpadeniye otdel'nykh elementov smyslovoy struktury slov kak osnova sinonimichnosti [Coincidence of individual elements of the semantic structure of words as the basis of synonymy], The Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, XXVI (3), 264–268. (In Russian)
Bragina, A. A. (1986). Sinonimy v literaturnom yazyke [Synonyms in the literary language], Nauka, Moscow, USSR. (In Russian)
Glazanova, Ye. V. and Shtern, A. S. (1996). Gradual'noye izmereniye verbal'noy leksiki [Gradual measurement of verbal vocabulary], Problems of modern theoretical and synchronous-descriptive linguistics. Issue 4: Semantics and communication, Publishing House of St. Petersburg University, St. Petersburg, Russia, 177–189. (In Russian)
Glezer, V. D. (1985). Zreniye i myshleniye [Vision and thinking], Nauka, Leningrad, USSR. (In Russian)
Grigor'yeva, A. D. (1959). Zametki o leksicheskoy sinonimii [Notes on lexical synonymy], Issues of the culture of speech, 2, 7–30. (In Russian)
Yevgen'yeva, A. P. (1966). Osnovnyye voprosy leksicheskoy sinonimiki [Basic questions of lexical synonymy], Essays on the synonymy of the modern Russian literary language, Nauka, Moscow, Leningrad, USSR, 4–29. (In Russian)
Zalevskaya, A. A. (2005). Psikholingvisticheskiye issledovaniya. Slovo. Tekst: Izbrannyye raboty [Psycholinguistic research. Word. Text: Selected papers], Gnosis, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Zvegintsev, V. A. (1963). Notes on lexical synonymy, Questions of theory and history of language: Collection in honor of prof. B. A. Larina, Nauka, Leningrad, USSR, 127–142. (In Russian)
Ivanova, A. I. (2006). Kontekstual'naya sinonimiya kak proyavleniye nominativnogo var'irovaniya v tekste: Na materiale zhurnal'nykh statey [Contextual synonymy as a manifestation of nominative variation in the text: Based on journal articles], Abstract of Ph.D. dissertation, Tver State University, Tver, Russia. (In Russian)
Issers, O. S. (2008). Kommunikativnyye strategii i taktiki russkogo yazyka [Communication strategies and tactics of the Russian language], URSS, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Kasevich, V. B. Trudy po yazykoznaniyu [Papers on linguistics], Publishing House of St. Petersburg University, St. Petersburg, Russia. (In Russian)
Klyuyeva, V. N. (1954). Sinonimy v russkom yazyke [Synonyms in the Russian language], Russian Language at School, 3, 1–9. (In Russian)
Knyazeva, Yu. O. (2008). Korpusnyy analiz v issledovanii sinonimii [Corpus analysis in the study of synonymy], Vestnik Kostroma State University, 14 (4), 165–169. (In Russian)
Kobozeva, I. M. (2004). Lingvisticheskaya semantika [Linguistic semantics], URSS, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Kuznetsova, E. V. (1982). Leksikologiya russkogo yazyka [Lexicology of the Russian language], Vysshaya shkola, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Kustova, G. I. (2004). Tipy proizvodnykh znacheniy i mekhanizmy yazykovogo rasshireniya [Types of derived values and mechanisms of language expansion], Yazyki slavyanskoy kul'tury, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Lagutina, A. V. (1967). Absolyutnyye sinonimy v sinonimicheskoy sisteme yazyka [Absolute synonyms in the synonymic system of the language], Lexical synonymy, Nauka, Moscow, USSR. (In Russian)
Lebedeva, S. V. (1999). Dva podkhoda k issledovaniyu leksicheskoy sinonimii [Two approaches to the study of lexical synonymy], Psycholinguistic studies of the meaning of the word and understanding of the text: Interuniversity thematic collection of scientific papers, Tver State University, Tver, Russia. (In Russian)
Novikov, L. A. Semantika russkogo yazyka [Semantics of the Russian language], Vysshaya shkola, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Palevskaya, M. F. (1964). Sinonimy v russkom yazyke [Synonyms in Russian], Prosveshcheniye, Moscow, USSR. (In Russian)
Pesina, S. A. (2011). Slovo v kognitivnom aspekte [Word in the cognitive aspect], Flinta, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Pokrovskaya, Ye. A. (1999). Leksicheskaya sinonimiya v kvantitativno-sistemnom aspekte (na materiale russkogo yazyka) [Lexical synonymy in the quantitative-systemic aspect (on the material of the Russian language)], Ph.D. dissertation, M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Rakhilina, Ye. V. (2008). Kognitivnyy analiz predmetnykh imen: semantika i sochetayemost' [Cognitive analysis of subject names: semantics and compatibility], Russkiye slovari, Moscow, Russia. (In Russian)
Sternin, I. A. (2011). Psikholingvisticheskoye znacheniye slova [Psycholinguistic meaning of the word], Bulletin of Peoples' Friendship University of Russia. Series "Russian and foreign languages and methods of their teaching", 1, 5–13. (In Russian)
Sternin, I. A. (2015). Problemy analiza struktury znacheniya slova [Problems of analysis of the structure of the meaning of a word], Direct-Media Moscow, Russia. Berlin, Germany. (In Russian)
Cheremisina, M. I. (2004). Teoreticheskiye problemy sintaksisa i leksikologii yazykov raznykh system [Theoretical problems of syntax and lexicology of languages of different systems], Nauka, Novosibirsk, Russia. (In Russian)
Chernigovskaya, T. V. and Deglin, B. L. (1986). Metaforicheskoye i sillogicheskoye myshleniye kak proyavleniye funktsional'noy asimmetrii mozga [Metaphorical and syllogical thinking as a manifestation of the functional asymmetry of the brain], Uchenyye zapiski. Trudy po znakovym sistemam, 19, 68–84. (In Russian)
Chernyak, V. D. (1992). Sinonimicheskiye svyazi slov v leksicheskoy sisteme russkogo yazyka [Synonymic connections of words in the lexical system of the Russian language], Sc.D. dissertation, Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, St. Petersburg, Russia. (In Russian)
Apresjan, J. (1992). Lexical semantics: user's guide to contemporary Russian vocabulary, Karoma, Ann Arbor, USA. (In English)
Clark, E. (1987). The principle of contrast, in MacWhinney, B. (ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition, Academic, New York, USA, 1–33. (In English)
Croft, W. and Cruse, A. (2004). Cognitive Linguistics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. (In English)
Cruse, A. (1986). Lexical semantics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. (In English)
Danglli, L. and Abazaj, G. (2009). Absolute versus Relative Synonymy, Linguistic and communicative performance, 2 (2), 64–68. (In English)
Edmonds, P. and Hirst, G. (2002). Near-synonymy and lexical choice, Computational Linguistics, 28 (2), 105–114. https://doi.org/10.1162/089120102760173625(In English)
Federmeier, K. (2007). Thinking ahead: the role and roots of prediction in language Comprehension, Psychophysiology, 44 (4), 491–505. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2007.00531.x. (In English)
Fillmore, C. (1985). Frames and the semantics of understanding, Quaderni di Semantica, VI (2), 222–254. (In English)
Greenbaum, S. (1974). Some verb-intensifier collocations in American and British English, American Speech, 49, 79–89. https://doi.org/10.2307/3087920(In English)
Gurevich, O., Crouch, R., King, T. and Paiva, V. de (2008). Deverbal Nouns in Knowledge Representation, Journal of Logic and Computation, 18 (3), 385–404. https://doi.org/10.1093/logcom/exm070(In English)
Hirst, G. and Wang, T. (2010). Near-synonym Lexical Choice in Latent Semantic Space, 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Proceedings of the Conference, Beijing, China, 1182–1190. (In English)
Inkpen, D. and Hirst, G. (2006). Building and using a lexical knowledge base of near-synonym differences, Computational Linguistic, 32 (2), 223–262. https://doi.org/10.1162/coli.2006.32.2.223(In English)
Jackson, H. (1988). Words and Their Meaning, Longman, London, UK. (In English)
Kasevich, V. (1997). Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka, (ed.), Semantic and Lexical Universals, Studies in Language, 21(2), 411–416. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.21.2.07kas (In English)
Lyons, J. (1995). Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511810213(In English)
Murphy, L. (2002). Semantic Relation and the Lexicon, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486494(In English)
Recanati, F. (2008). Pragmatics and Semantics, in Horn, L. and Ward, G. (eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK, 442–462. (In English)
Reiter, E. and Sripada, S. (2004). Contextual influences on near-synonym choice, Natural Language Generation: Third International Conference, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Germany, USA, 161–170. (In English)
Sparck Jones, K. (1964). Synonymy and semantic classification, Abstract of Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. (In English)
Xiao, R. and Mcenery, T. (2006). Collocation, semantic prosody, and near synonymy: a cross-linguistic perspective, Applied Linguistics, 27 (1), 103–129. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ami045(In English)
Zapico, M. and Vivas, J. (2015). Synonymy from a linguistic-cognitive perspective. Measuring semantic distance, Onomazein, 32, 198–211. (In English)
Zeng, Xian-mo (2007). Semantic relationships between contextual synonyms, US-China education review, 4 (9), 33–37. (In English)