lexical and semantie relations

112 LEXICAL MEA ING
are not strictly substitutable because the sentences in (lO) would not be equally
appropriate in all ocia1 contexts.
(10) a.
b.
c.
Where is the john?
Where i the lavatory?
Where is the powder room?
John, la vato ry, and powder room are sense synonyms because they denote the
same things, but because they differ in register and connotation, they are variants
of one another. Synonyms can be variants with respect to any number of nondenotational
properties, including connotation, register, dialect, and affect. The
American sense of bathroom (which can refer to a room with a toilet but no ba th)
and British 100 (which refer to a room with a toilet) are ense near-synonyms,
but dialectal variants.
Why so many synonyms?
The moral of the synonym story is that it is very rare for two words to mean
exactly the ame thing. As Cruse (1986:270) has noted, "languages abhor ab olute
synonyms just as nature abhors a vacuum." English has many near-synonyms
because it has readily borrowed words from other languages and because English
productively makes new open-class word through the morphological processes
of derivation and compounding (§1.3.4) and conversion (§5.3.2).
In some case , those new or borrowed word tart out a perfect ynonym
for existing words in the language, but over time one of two things generally
happens. In some cases one of the ynonym "wins" and the other drop out of
use. For example, the Greek-derived Eucharist began to replace the Old English
husi toward the end of the Middle Age, and now husl is obsolete. In other ca e ,
the words' senses diverge. A famous example is what happened when Norman
French words for certain live tock animals were borrowed into Engli h in the
Middle Ages. Before that point, Engli h speakers had words for these animals
and used them also to describe meat from those animals; so they ate ox or sheep or
pig fiesh. After the French words for livestock became available, Engli h peakers
came to use the French livestock word (which became anglicized a beef, mutton,
pork) to refer to meat, while the native English words were retained for denoting
the animal. Other animal words were not affected by French borrowings, either
because the French word was not popularized in English (in the case of lamb)
or because the word was added to the language later (in the ca e of turkey).
Synonyms are also found in ca e where one word i reserved for technical
registers while the other sounds more folksy or poetic. For example, the Latinate
uterus is a more "medical" sounding word than womb, which is more likely to
be used in poetry.
Languages react to ynonyms in this way for a number of reason . First, it i
not economical or helpful to have many word for the ame thing - it takes more
effort to learn and remember two word form when one i sufficient. When we go
through the effort of having two words, we usually work under the a sumption
of a principIe of contrast - ti
different meanings. This mean
the same thing as another WOl
di fference - in denotation, conn
Clark and Clark (1979) give ex
noun into verbs results in a nl
for fo cook and to che! in (ll):
(Il) a.
b.
Phil cooked up a fea I
Phil chef'd up a feast.
To cook is an established verb,
denotes the ame activity a lo
a little different than cook. For
more professionalism or panacJ
In um mary, while language
words that are very close in n
can be seen as enriching, rathei
is aid to be particularly syna
more expressive than language
in meaning can be conveyed a
paralinguistic (e.g. intonational
6.2.3 Hyponymy and h~
Another type of pan
or are contained in, other mee
extension (§2.3. J) of one word ii
the extension of cheddar ia'
i cheddar is al o cheese, but ev
( ince it could be gouda or mo
cheddar is a type of cheese, a:
meaning of cheddar.
Properties of inch
The inclusion relation is asynu
is not a type of cheddar, o we I
relation: cheddar is a hyponyn
dar. The e terms come from the
over,' and this under/over inu
a "family trees," as illustrated
ification, or taxonomy, of foc
peaking, we use the terms hy!
relations between words like c
cheddar itself, or the nation of (