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104 Jarmo Harri Jantunen
2.2 Lexical and grammatical patterning of synonyms
The meaning of synonymous words is similar with respect to their central
semantic traits, but due to “minor or peripheral traits” (Cruse 1986:267),
synonyms are not interchangeable in all contexts. This is to say that synonyms
are context dependent. According to Cruse (2000:157), few, if any, synonymous
words pass the test of absolute synonymity, meaning that lexical items would
appear in exactly the same contexts. The contextual use of synonyms can
be determined by linguistic and/or non-linguistic factors. The latter involves
aspects such as register- (e.g. spoken language), dialect- (social or geographic)
and style-specific (formal or colloquial) contextual restrictions. For example,
the synonymous expressions die and kick the bucket have dissimilar ranges of
use: die is more neutral and can be used in several contexts but kick the bucket is
a more colloquial expression which could more presumably be found in slang
or dialects than, let us say, in medical reports (for synonyms of die, see e.g.
Cruse 1986). The linguistic factors in turn concern features which are not as
obvious and visible as non-linguistic ones, that is, lexical and grammatical
associations, which also determine and restrict the use of words. By lexical
associations are meant the systematic co-occurrence patterns that a target word
has with other words (see e.g. Biber et al. 1998:6). This association is often
called collocation and the adjacent words around target words collocates (see
e.g. Firth 1968; Sinclair 1991). In other words, collocation refers to recurrent
co-occurrences that a word has with its collocates within a given distance of
each other, that is, in a pre-established span. The span can be determined by
a structural unit (e.g. a sentence or entire text, see Kenny 2001:90) but more
commonlyitis‘ashortspace’betweenatargetword(anode)anditscollocates,
measured in words (Sinclair 1991:170).
According to many scholars, only recurring or habitual co-occurrences
can be considered as collocation. For example, Kjellmer (1987) counts only
those associations that occur at least twice, whereas Kennedy (1991) puts
the threshold at four occurrences – and in Jones and Sinclair’s (1974) study
the limit is set as high as ten occurrences. In addition to counting only the
raw frequencies of collocations (as in Kenny 2001), the collocations are often
analysed by using more or less statistical approaches. Mauranen (2000), for
instance, has used relative frequencies (occurrences per million words) in
comparison of lexical combinations in translations and non-translations and
Biber et al. (1998) in analyses of synonyms. This norming of frequency counts
is useful especially when corpora are not comparable in terms of length (Biber
et al. ibid. 263). However, raw frequency counts or normed frequencies are