on of speech.
The way synonyms function may be seen from the following example: Already in this half-hour of bombardment hundreds upon hundreds of men would have been violently slain, smashed, torn, gouged, crusted, and mutilated.
The synonymous words smash and crush are semantic-ally very close; they combine to give a forceful representation of the atrocities of war. Richness and clearness of language are of paramount importance in so far as they promote precision of thought. Even this preliminary example makes it obvious that the still very common definitions of synonyms as words of the same language having the same meaning or as different words that stand for the same notion are by no means accurate and even in a way misleading. By the very nature of language every word has its own history, its own peculiar motivation, and its own typical contexts. And besides there is always some hidden possibility of different connotation arid which is feeling in each of them. Moreover, words of the same meaning would be useless for communication: they would encumber the language, not enrich it.
If two words exactly coincide in meaning and use, the natural tendency is for one of them to change its meaning or drop out of the language. Thus synonyms are words only similar but not identical in meaning-. This definition is correct but vague. A more precise linguistic definition should be based on a workable notion of tie semantic structure of the word and of the complex nature of every separate meaning in a polysemantic word. Each separate lexical meaning of a word has been described in Chapter VII as consisting of a denotational component identifying the notion or the object and reflecting the essential features of the notion named, shades of meaning reflecting its secondary features, additional connotations resulting from typical contexts in which the word is used, its emotional component arid stylistic coloring; connotations are not necessarily present in every word. The basis of a synonymic opposition is formed by the first of the above named components, ie the denotational component. It will be remembered that the term opposition means the relationship of partial difference between two partially similar elements of a language. A common denotational component brings the words together into a synonymic group. All the other components can vary and thus form the distinctive features of the synonymic oppositions.
Synonyms can therefore be defined in terms of linguistics as two or more words of the same language, belonging to the same part of speech and possessing one or more identical or nearly identical denotational meanings, interchangeable, at least in some contexts, without any considerable alteration in denotational meaning, hut differing in morphemic composition, phonemic shape, shades of meaning, connotations, affective value, style, valence and idiomatic use. Additional characteristics of style, emotional coloring and valence peculiar to one of the elements in a synonymic group may be absent in one or all of the others.
The definition is of necessity very bulky and needs some commenting upon. By pointing out the fact that synonyms belong to the same part of speech the definition makes it clear that synonymic grouping is really a special case of lexico-grammatical grouping based on semantic proxim...
