Dilin Liu University of Alabama Presented at the Symposium on Rethinking Synonymy University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland October 29, 2010 p

Dilin LiuUniversity of Alabama

Presented at the Symposium on Rethinking SynonymyUniversity of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

October 29, 2010p

Rationale for the Present Study

While recently there have been quite a few studies on synonymous verbs and adjectives (Hanks 1996; Divjak 2006; Gries 2001, 2006; Gries & Otoni 2010; Liu 2010), there appears to have been little research on synonymous nouns.

Most of the existing studies on synonymy have been corpus based. Yet corpus research has its limitations, for the researcher is not able to ask the speaker/writer why he/she chose to use the specific word instead of its synonyms.

Recently, a few scholars have combined corpus analysis with solicited data in research on synonyms and have produced interesting and meaningful results (Arppe & Järvikivi, 2007).

2

The Present Study: Synonymous Nouns Examined and the Methodology Used

Hence, the present study examines two sets of (near)-synonymous nouns (authority, power, and right; duty, obligation, and responsibility) by using both corpus and solicited data. The corpus analysis constitutes the first phase of the study, and the solicited data the second.

Phase I, the corpus analysis: The corpus used in the study was the 400 million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English; the method adopted for the corpus analysis was the Behavioral Profile (BP) approach, which focuses on the distributional patterns of a lexical item to identify its semantic and usage patterns (Hanks 1996; Divjak 2006; Divjak & Gries 2006; Gries 2001, 2006; Liu 2010). Specifically, the analysis of this study focused on the pre-nominal (adjective) and post-nominal (infinitive) modifiers of the synonymous nouns.

3

The Present Study: Synonymous Nouns Examined and the Methodology Used

I queried the COCA for the twenty most frequent adjectives and infinitives used with each of the nouns; then, I classified the adjectives and infinitive into semantic groups and added up the frequencies of each noun in each semantic group.

A multifactorial test, called hierarchical configural factorial analysis, was applied to the results to determine whether and where significant differences existed. An HCFA is more powerful and informative than the Chi-square test. It can ascertain which frequency is significantly higher or significantly lower than expected, thus enabling us to better identify the semantic and usage patterns of the synonymous nouns in questions.

4

The Present Study: Procedures and Results

In other words, I conducted a BP analysis of the distributional patterns of the attributive structures that modify the nouns, including the adjective preceding the nouns and the infinitive phrases following the nouns, i.e. with which adjectives/infinitives the nouns are typically used. The reason for doing so was that it would help determine what type of authority/power/right or what type duty/ obligation/responsibility each noun is designated most frequently as.

The results, including those of the HCFA test (reported in the tables below), indicate that pre-/post-nominal modifiers were effective in catching most of the semantic differences among synonymous nouns and in delineating a “coarse” internal semantic structure of a synonymous-noun set.

5

The Present Study: Corpus Analysis Results

6

Adjectives (by Semantic Type) Used Most Frequently to Modify Authority/Power/Right

civil/social economic individual/ natural. . .

legal/ constitu-

tional moral political

regulatory/ controlling

Authority 328 A 15 41 A 443 T 505 T 299 T 132 T

Power 268 A 701 T 114 A 310 A 45 A 1904 T 128 T

Right 10,421 T 185 A 3,634T 2,311 129 A 699 A 2 A

Note. *A cell frequency followed by the letter T means it is a ‘type’ based on an HCFA test (i.e. it is significantly higher than expected) while a cell frequency followed by an A means it is an ‘antitype’ (significantly lower than expected). A cell frequency followed by no letter is neither.

It is clear from the results that authority and power behave very similarly while right exhibits a quite different behavioral pattern.


7

Infinitive Verbs (by Semantic Type) Used Most Frequently after Authority/Power/Right

to decide

to get/ keep/take

to know to make to

regulate/ control. .

to say/ speak

to vote/ choose

Authority 45 T 248 T 1 A 139 T 359 T 45 A 13 A

Power 83 T 293 T 3 A 284 T 470 T 48 A 42 A

Right 153 A 588 A 698 T 403 A 324 A 603 A 1345 T

Here, authority and power show an identical behavioral pattern, which is opposite of that of right.


Adjectives (by Semantic Type) Used Most Frequently to Modify Duty/Obligations/Responsibility

adminstra-tive/pro-fessional

civic/ social

constitut-ional/legal

financial/ fiscal

moral/ ethical

personal/ individual

religious/military

Duty 134 T 209 404 T 4 A 174 A 17 A 196 T

Obligation 54 A 121 A 405 T 118 559 T 30 A 100 T

Responsi-bility 303 765 T 377 T 446 T 388 A 1,091 T 38 A

The results seem to suggest that while the three nouns behave quite differently from one another, duty and obligation show more similarities than responsibility, which exhibits a noticeable difference in its behavior in several categories.

8


Infinitive Verbs (by Semantic Type) Used Most Frequently after Duty/Obligations/Responsibility

to act/ perform

to assist/ protect/ provide

…

to defend/ prosecu-

te/up-hold

to ensure/ keep/

maintain...

to inform/ disclose/ report/

tell

to make/ take

to obey/ comply

Duty 36 225 47 86 98 T 75 A 27

Obliga-tion 27 290 38 79 91 102 33

Respons-ibility 31 318 25 A 151 57 A 196 T 2 A

Here, the results appear to suggest that while there is not much difference among the three nouns, responsibility displays a noticeable difference in a few categories.

9


Also, the results appear to show that, in each synonym set, there is a dominant member that is used significantly more frequently/broadly (i.e., with onomasiological salience)and tends to cross into the other members’ traditional functional territories, e.g. right in the authority/ power/right set and responsibility in the duty/obligation/ responsibility set.

E.g. who, the U.S. President or Congress, can declare war is truly an issue of authority or power, i.e. which of the two is authorized or given the power by the constitution to declare war. Yet, as the data show, many politicians and scholars used the word right. (Also the right to arrest/fire someone).

Similarly, historically, what a family member is supposed to do for his/her family members is considered a duty, e.g. fatherly/motherly/wisely/filial duty (also civic duty). Yet the COCA data show that some speakers/writers use the word responsibility in such cases.

10


While these revealed distributional patterns offer us a general understanding of the synonyms, they were unable to show some fine-grained differences that appeared to exist.

This is because the synonyms in each set, while displaying many different distributional patterns, also exhibited some identical patterns, e.g. they sometimes took the same pre-/post-nominal complements/modifiers (e.g. civic duty/obligation/ responsibility; authority/power/right to vote or to declare war).

Of course, some of the usages are of very low frequency (e.g. power to vote) or rare, but they are actual choices.

11


Phase II, the solicited data analysis: Rationale: An important question is whether the different

nouns used in the same distributional context in each case had the same meaning and/or what were the motivations for the different choices if the choices indeed have the same meaning.

To help answer this question, I decided to select some such difficult-to-distinguish uses of the synonyms in the set in context to be used in a forced-choice instrument where the synonymous nouns of interest used would be deleted and the subjects recruited for the study would have to fill in the missing items by selecting from one of the synonyms. Unlike Arppe & Järvikivi’s (2007) study, this study did not use an acceptability judgment, however.

12


Instead, this study added a procedure: it asked the subjects to explain why they made the choice they did. To my knowledge, no previous studies have used this procedure. The reason for using it is that it could help us understand the rationales of the subjects’ choices, which could, in turn, offer us a better understanding of the psychological and cognitive factors in the use of synonymy.

Of the selected examples, most of the adjectives and infinitives the nouns were used with are those that appeared on the top 20 most frequent ones, but some rare usages were included in order to help ascertain whether the subjects of the study would make the same choice in the same given context.

13


Subjects: 42 native speakers of English (12 undergraduate students and 30 graduate students of English) participated in the study.

Instrument: 32 sentences/passages from COCA with each containing one of the synonymous nouns were selected and used in a questionnaire with the synonymous nouns deleted.

Procedures: The subjects were asked to read each of the sentences/ passages, fill in the missing noun by selecting from the synonym set, and also explain the rationale for their choice. A sample question:

Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution says Congress has the ______to declare war.

A. authority B. right C. power

14

The Present Study: Solicited Data Analysis Results

The results show that in 17 out of the 32 questions (53%), the most popular choice by the subjects differed from the word used in the original COCA sentence.

In 7 of these 17 items, the subjects’ choices were not those of the most frequent in the COCA.

Also, according to a one-way Chi-square test, there was no significant difference among the three choices in 6 of the 32 questions, i.e. in each of these six questions, none of the three choices (i.e. none of the three synonyms in the set) was favored significantly more by the subjects.

How do we account for these differences? That is, how do we explain the difference 1) between the main choice of the subjects and the choice of the original COCA speaker/writer, 2) between the main choice of the subjects and the most favored in COCA, and 3) among the subjects’ choices?

15


To account for the differences will require the examination of the subjects’ rationales for their choices because the reasons the subjects gave should shed some light on the issue.

The analysis of the students’ rationales for their choices reveals two major driving forces for the subjects decision-making: 1) construal and 2) conventional usage/entrenchment of a lexical item with its typical collocates indicated by frequency (semasiological/onomasiological salience, Geeraerts, 2010; Grondellaers & Geeraerts, 2003).

As evidence for the use of construal, many subjects explained their choices in terms of how they view the context in question and how that view affected their choice. For example, in the question:

Our ancestors struggled and died to give us _____ to vote. Let’s not let them down so our voices are heard. A. authority (0) B. right (40) C. power (2)

40 of the students chose ‘right” but 2 chose “power”

16


One of the two explained that her reason for not choosing “right” is that “right” is not something that is given; power is; the other explained his by focusing on the result of voting (how voting could, as a power, make a difference).

Also the example: The group is trying to help initiate a new constitutional amendment that gives

voters the __________ to vote for "None Of The Above."

A. authority (0) B. right (32) C. power (10)One of the students explained her choice of “power” this way: “‘power’ has

to do with practical ability here. Although they’re considering how much authority to give Congress [voters], we’re talking about a very specific action that they will or won’t be able to do.” Another wrote: “Honestly, the other two just seem not to fit well. ‘Power’ equates [to] ability [here].”

17


As evidence of the influence of conventional usage (entrenchment or salience) on the use of synonyms, many subjects, in explaining their choices related to questions such as civic/sad/religious duty, right to vote,

and social responsibility, stated: “This is what I often hear people say”; “I’ve often heard the phrase.”; “idiomatic usage”; “Common/most common/set phrase/usage/collocation”; “It sounds the best/right (when I read it aloud)”; and “one unit/a chunk.”

Specifically, 21 (58%) of the 36 subjects who chose duty in question 19 (i.e. choosing civic duty) mentioned the phrase being a common/set usage as the reason for their choice. 18 (43%) of those who selected “right to vote” made the choice because they believed it to be a set or idiomatic expression.

18


It is clear from the results that the two (construal and conventional usage or entrenchment) often compete in speakers’ decisions regarding which synonym to choose. Such a competition can be seen in some of the students’ responses in the following two pairs of examples:

Pair 1. The group is trying to help initiate a new constitutional amendment that gives voters the __________ to vote for "None Of The Above." A. authority (0) B. right (32) C. power (10) v.s. Our ancestors struggled and died to give us the _________ to vote. Let's not let them down so our voices are heard. A. authority B. right (40) C. power (2) * One student chose “power” in the former because “Honestly, the other two just

seem not to fit well. ‘Power’ equates ability” Yet in the latter, she selected “right” because “I’m just used to hearing ‘right to vote’ (equated with suffrage).”

19


Pair 2. David Kaczynski [who reported on his Unabomber brother Ted Kaczynski] knew the risk when he chose social ____________ over family loyalty. A. duty (7) B. obligation (11) C. responsibility (24) v.s. Friedman famously argued in a 1970 New York Times Magazine article:

"There is one and only one social __________of business -- to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engage in open and free competition without deception or fraud." A. duty (3) B. obligation (23) C. responsibility (16) Three students chose “responsibility” in the former question because they

believed “social responsibility” was a set/idiomatic phrase. Yet, then, they selected “social obligations” in the latter because they insisted that business companies were obliged to practice no deception or fraud.

20


In these examples, two vying forces were clearly at work: in many contexts, conventional usage (frequency/entrenchment) wins out; in others, a speaker/writer’s unique construal of the situation and/or the word in question prevails.

Also, if we recall, in 7 of the 17 items where the choices of the majority of the subjects differed from those of the specific COCA speakers/writers, the choices simultaneously differed from the most frequently used ones in COCA; yet, in the other 10 of the 17 items, the majority of the subjects went with the most frequently used choices in COCA. This fact suggests, again, the competition between construing and conventional usage in the use of synonymy.

21

Conclusion

The study has shown that construing and conventional usage (frequency/entrenchment/onomasiological salience) are two key factors in the use of synonymy.

Speakers typically follow conventional usage due to its entrenchment/salience effect unless they construe the situational context in a way that would necessitate the choice of a lexical item that contradicts traditional usage. In other words, in the latter case, their choice would differ from the conventional usage.

Synonyms used in the same context do not always have the same meaning; this finding shows the limitations of the corpus-based BP approach in the study of synonyms.

22

Conclusion

Solicited data, especially those of human subjects’ explanations of the rationales for their synonym choices, are very valuable in our understanding of synonymy and its use.

Further studies using the same or similar approaches are necessary to validate the results, especially when the approach is used in studying synonyms in other parts of speech, e.g. adjectives, adverbs, and verbs.

23

Selected ReferencesArppe, A & Järvikivi, J. (2007). Every method counts: Combining corpus-based and

experimental evidence in the study of synonymy. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 3.2, 131–159.

Divjak, D. (2006). Ways of intending: Delineating and structuring near synonyms. In S. Th Gries and A.Stefanowitsch (Eds.), Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics: Corpus- based Approaches to Syntax and Lexis (pp. 19-56.). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Divjak, D. & Gries, S. Th. (2006). Ways of trying in Russian: clustering behavioral profiles. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 2, 23-60.

Geerarerts, D. (2010). Theories of lexical semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Gries, S. Th. (2001). A corpus linguistic analysis of English –ic vs –ical adjectives. ICAME

Journal, 25, 65-108. Gries, S. Th. (2004). HCFA 3.2. A program for RGries, S. Th. & Otani, N. (2010). Behavioral profiles: A corpus-based perspective on synonymy

and antonymy. ICAME Journal, 34, 121-150.

Grondellaers, S. & Geeraerts, D. (2003). Towards a pragmatic model of cognitive onomasiology. In Hubert Guychens, Rene Dirven, & John Taylor (Eds.), Cognitive approaches to lexical semantics (pp. 67-92). Berline: Mouton de Guyter.

Hanks, P. (1996). Contextual dependency and lexical sets. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 1 (1), 75-98.

Liu, D. (2010). Is it chief, main, major, primary, or principal concern? A corpus-based behavioral profile study of the near-synonyms. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 15, 56-87.

24

Documents

Dilin Liu University of Alabama Presented at the Symposium on Rethinking Synonymy University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland October 29, 2010 p