What is a statue? The question is simple. And it can be answered in two ways. Give a battery of synonyms that will allow you to restore the meaning by analogy, or you can consider the meaning of a verb related to a noun and then the very meaning of the word “sculpture”. We are not looking for easy ways, so we will take the long road, and of course, synonyms are also expected.
Meaning of verb and noun
To answer the question about the meaning of a noun, you need to consider the verb "sculpt": "To mold from clay, carve from stone, wood or cast sculptures from metal." Thus, almost any monument is suitable as an illustration for the meaning of the verb. But the verb, as it should be, describes the process, not the result. The result is fixed precisely by the noun. The artist (in the broadest sense) sculpts, and what happens afterwards is a sculpture (one cannot do without some tautology here). Let's check our version in the explanatory dictionary. Let's answer the question of what a statue is: "A sculptural image, a statue." Yes, everything is as expected.
Sentences with the word
Vocabulary knowledge is one thing and quite another - an object of study in living everyday speech. Let's look at examples of sentences that use the meaning of the noun "sculpture" and its related verb.
- We entered the museum and the first thing we saw was a stone sculpture two meters in size.
- When Peter entered the house and turned on the light, people began to shout: “Happy birthday!” He was taken aback and froze like a statue. Piotr didn't really like surprises.
- Pavel Evgenievich made something in the garage every evening. Or maybe he sculpted a sculpture or a bust. Those around him did not understand, but he did not care, he was happy.
The first two sentences refer to the meaning of the noun, and the last to the verb.
Synonyms and idioms
If you just pick up replacements, it's routine and boring. Another thing is if you solve some problem and embed synonyms in it. But first, let's look at the list of replacements that, if necessary, can lend a helping hand to the object of study:
- figure;
- statue;
- sculpture.
The rest of the words that could have made the list were not selected because they meant a process, not a finished product.
And the problem to be solved is simple. Do you know the stable phrase "it stands like a statue"? Try to present the above replacements in place of "statues" in this phraseological unit? That does not work? It may work, but the effect will not be the same. That's the magic of language. sometimes evenprose expressions require poetic precision.
