Synonyms are words that are close or identical in meaning and differ in expressiveness and stylistic features. They are of different types, for example, linguistic, stylistic. There are also contextual synonyms.
In a broader definition, these are words that have close or identical meanings, expressing one concept, emphasizing its various features, while differing in expressive stylistic features, compatibility. This understanding is characteristic of modern linguists and has developed in almost all European languages.
Synonyms and parts of speech
Language and contextual synonyms are also characterized by the fact that they always refer to the same part of speech. Conditions of morphological generality are necessary in their definition. Thus, in Russian, they can be attributed to the words moment and moment, jelly and aspic, huge and huge, lie and lie, as if and as if, and so on.
Types of synonyms
There are more than ten thousand synonymous rows in the Russian language, and different types are distinguished on the basis of a meaningful criterion.
- Doublets are absolute synonyms, that is, wordscompletely identical in meaning (behemoth and hippo, linguistics and linguistics).
There are few pure doublets in the language. The words hippopotamus and hippopotamus differ on the basis of scientific and unscientific, own and alien. The problem arises when the concepts are close in meaning. Native speakers quite easily determine the stylistic difference between them intuitively. It is more difficult when it comes to semantic synonyms: house and building - the unit "house" is used only when talking about where people live. These are generic inclusion relationships.
- Conceptual, ideographic or semantic synonyms - words that characterize different degrees of manifestation of a feature. For example: beautiful and lovely.
- Stylistic synonyms - words that give different emotional and evaluative characteristics of the signified: run away, run away or run away; eyes, eyes or zenki.
- mixed type - semantic-stylistic synonyms that differ both in part of the conceptual meaning and in connotations. For example: fearful, fearful, cowardly.
Linguistic and contextual synonyms
Synonyms, fixed in linguistic practice, and having common semes as part of the conceptual macrocomponent, regardless of the context, are called linguistic: scarlet, bright red, crimson, and so on. Such words remain synonymous always, regardless of the context in which they are used. Special dictionaries are compiled for them.
Speechor contextual synonyms reveal the proximity of meanings only in a specific text and do not have common semes in the language. For their convergence, conceptual correlation is sufficient, that is, they can become words that evoke certain associations in the mind of the speaker or writer. Absolutely different concepts can enter into synonymous relations, mean the same thing and freely replace each other in a certain context, but only within it. They are not recorded in dictionaries.
