SWorld – 18-30 March 2014 http://www.sworld.com.ua/index.php/ru/conference/the-content-of-conferences/archives-of-individual-conferences/march-2014

MODERN DIRECTIONS OF THEORETICAL AND APPLIED RESEARCHES ‘2014 Технические науки – Информатика, вычислительная техника и автоматизация

УДК 811.111’42

Крацило С. О.

КОНЦЕПТ MARRIAGE У ВИМІРАХ КВАЗІСИНОНІМІЇ ТА ПОЛІСЕМІЇ

Національний університет «Львівська політехніка»,

Львів, Степана Бандери 12, 79000

Kratsylo S. O.

MARRIAGE AND ITS NEAR-SYNONYMIC AND POLYSEMIC

DIMENSIONS

Lviv Polytechnic National University,

Lviv, Stepana Bandery 12, 79000

Анотація. В роботі розглядаються явища неточної, або квазі- синонімії

та полісемії, а також недоліки та переваги дискретних та неперервних

(континуальних) моделей в дослідженні даних явищ. Лінґвістичну розвідку

проілюстровано аналізом та кластерною моделлю концептів, пов’язаних із

marriage.

Ключові слова: полісемія, неточна (квазі-) синонімія, неперервна

(континуальна) модель, дискретна модель, кластер.

Abstract. The paper deals with the problems of near-synonymy, polysemy and

considers advantages and disadvantages of discrete and continuous models in

studying the above mentioned notions. The linguistic study is illustrated with the

analysis and clustered model of marriage concepts.

Key words: polysemy, near-synonymy, continuous model, discrete model,

cluster.

The predominance of discrete approaches in linguistics in the 20th century (such

as hard-line structuralism, transformational and generative trends, resorting to logical

formalisms) has shaped the objects of analysis such as mutually disjoined units,

characterized by necessary and sufficient conditions.

However, last few decades have marked a shift towards continuous methods of

research, especially in the approaches of cognitive linguistics, which are in their turn

under the influence of theories coming from other horizons such as psychology or

logic. Even though R.W. Langacker states that “…linguistic structure reduces,

ultimately, to the activity of discrete neurons that fire in discrete pulses…” the

phenomena emerging out of this activity could be either continuous or discrete [9,

p.9].

In terms of linguistic properties continuity and discreteness could refer to both

tongue and speech depending on the viewing angle: “On the one hand, the continuous

movement in tongue is contrasted with discrete cuts in speech; but on the other hand,

the finiteness of potentials in tongue is contrasted with the infinitude of possible

effects in speech” [6, p.104].

According to certain researchers proper linguistic continuity is involved in the

world-conceptualization process occurring via language, it “… concerns the link

between signifiers and significates, between markers and underlying linguistic-

cognitive operations” [6, p.94]. The notion of continuity is being considered not only

in lexical and grammatical semantics, but also on other levels linked with semantics:

morpho-semantic, syntactic-semantic and pragmatic-semantic.

I assume that discreteness or continuity can be regarded both as tools to access

and manipulate lexical meaning and properties of phenomena.

The advantage of continuity-based models is that they can account for

characterizing the meanings of units of a language both in synchrony (semantic value

fields) and in diachrony (historical shifts of semantic values). Discrete approaches

demonstrate problems dealing with the facts of graduality, i.e. considering two

mutually exclusive values and confronted with intermediate points (one or more) a

researcher lacks a mechanism to account for them. Another problem discrete

approaches find problems dealing with concerns movement, which is inherent of

every living system, including a language as the meaning is considered to be shaped

between the certain points in a linguistic system [see 6, p.97].

This article is aimed at analyzing two important linguistic notions of synonymy

and polysemy, and discrete and continuous approaches used to study them. The

concept marriage is used as an example of modeling continuous model based on

discrete dictionary material.

Even though polysemy has attracted considerably higher attention of researchers

than synonymy, it has been mainly studied from the discrete prospective. Two main

approaches treating polysemy in discrete terms are homonymic reduction and static

polysemy, which face the problems of defining the number of meanings (leading to

atomization) and choosing their order as well as selecting the factors that make a

particular sense of a word distinct enough from others to separately list it.

In the classical model of polysemy, the language understander picks one sense

as the ‘correct’ meaning of the word discarding the others. A drift from the above

mentioned view suggests that “the meaning of a polysemous item can be conceived

not as a finite list of inter-linked meanings but as a "potential" of meanings in

context” [6, p.101].

As D. Tourezky reasonably argues, these are in fact all the senses that blend in a

particular contextual meaning “… with different degree of participation based on

their respective salience,” where “the effect of the blending is to generate a

collection of inferences, or a potential for inferences, based on all… the ways of

understanding the action” [16, p.233]. The researcher treats the notion of semantic

continuity as “…a broad range of shades of meaning [that] may be derived from a

polysemous word in context, by mixing multiple senses weighted by salience. This

weighting is a function of both world knowledge, e.g., knowledge about the

properties of objects like apples, boats, and cakes, and contextual priming. The latter

causes particular senses to figure more prominently in the conglomeration of

meanings without necessarily eliminating any of the lesser senses.” According to him

“A discrete semantic space would certainly suffice, provided only that the grain was

fine enough to accomodate a sufficiently large number of semantic distinctions”

[16, pp.233-234]. D. Touretzky develops a scheme in which different competing

interpretations, that is various discrete nodes, are partially active in a linguistic

situation with the strongest remaining in the end. Thus a continuous system made of a

finite number of discrete units (or nodes) is created. The linguist provides a detailed

investigation of various meanings of the verb to cut using localist and distributed

networks [15].

C. L. Harris suggests that a word is similar to “… a receptive field that may vary

in size and the degree to which it overlaps with the receptive fields of other words.

On this metaphor, polysemous words have wide receptive fields, and thus cover large

(and perhaps illdefined) areas of semantic space. A distinct meaning (i.e., small

region of multi-dimensional semantic space) is identified when several words, or

words plus aspects of the non-linguistic context, combine to narrow down the space

of possible meanings” [7, p.208]. These processing units possess a receptive field

compiled of a field of simpler units. Simple individual units are devoid of a

determinable or distinct meaning and concepts are nothing but activation patterns

across these fields of units. Words themselves neither encode a particular meaning

nor do they point to several specific meanings.

When a lexical item becomes polysemous, its usage rate increases, yet

semantically it becomes bleached and in order to boost a communicative effect

speakers reach for new words [11].

Most would agree that apart from its basic “dictionary” meaning a word can

communicate a multitude of connotations, inferences, and attitudes and often a lexical

item has near-synonyms that differ from it exclusively in these nuances.

There is little doubt that synonymy influences the structure of lexicon to a high

extent, however this notion has been given substantially less attention in linguistics,

psychology and other related disciplines than polysemy (which is undoubtedly

equally fundamental and also intrinsically affects the arrangement of lexical

knowledge). Synonymy has been mostly regarded as not posing any linguistic

difficulty with synonyms treated as either identical in meaning or synonymy rejected

altogether and thus lexical items handled as distinct units.

Accepting a metaphorical definition of the language as a naturally developing

organism, absolute synonymy falls at odds with this rudimentary description because

“natural languages abhor absolute synonyms just as nature abhors a vacuum …” [3].

Absolute synonyms would be likely either to fall out of the language or gain

new shades of meaning. The latter occurring quite often, there emerge near-synonyms

(or plesionyms) – “almost synonyms, but not quite; very similar, but not identical, in

meaning; not fully intersubstitutable, but instead varying in their shades of

denotation, connotation, implicature, emphasis, or register” [5, p.107]. D. A. Cruse

distinguishes the following 4 types of near- (or relative) synonyms: denotational,

stylistic, expressive and structural variations [3], which are specificated by

Ph. Edmonds into 35 subcategories [5].

Truth-conditional semantics treats concepts denoted by lexical items as sets of

features that are collectively necessary and individually sufficient to define a concept.

Although this system is efficient in explaining basic denotational features, it fails to

efficiently represent the intricate nature of near-synonymic variations or account for

context-depending meanings [12].

Following the idea expressed by F. de Saussure, Ph. Edmonds and G. Hirst

stress on the importance of the context which both determines and explicates the

lexical item choice “… the meaning of an open-class content word, however it

manifests itself in text or speech, arises out of a context-dependent combination of a

basic inherent context-independent denotation and a set of explicit differences to its

near-synonyms… Thus, word meaning is not explicitly represented in the lexicon but

is created (or generated)” [4, pp.117-118].

Many linguistic and computational theories apply two or three level

representational models to account for various lexico-semantic phenomena:

1)conceptual–semantic and syntactic–semantic; 2)conceptual–semantic,

subconceptual/stylistic–semantic and syntactic–semantic [see 15; 4]. The second

model suggests a transition from pure ontological knowledge into linguistic

considering fine-grained meanings and near-synonymy, with the intermediate level

forming a clustered model of lexical knowledge.

To illustrate this, I have taken the cluster of marriage as the object of my

research. Lexical item marriage is itself highly polysemous, which is represented in

the Figure 1. The figure elucidates part of the knowledge representation of the cluster

of marriage nouns (marriage, wedlock, matrimony, wedding, nuptials, and

espousals); it is explicitly based on the entries from Webster’s New Dictionary of

Synonyms, Collins Cobuild Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary. New Digital

Edition 2008, © HarperCollins Publishers 2008 and Oxford Dictionary of English,

3rd Edition © Oxford University Press 2010.

The core denotation, the shaded dotted region taken in a rounded rectangle,

represents an actual union of two human beings of opposite sex (the actors). The

large regions, bounded by solid and dashed lines, show the concepts and styles that

can be conveyed by the lexical items profiling marriage, in relation to each other.

In the model, peripheral concepts are used to represent the denotational

distinctions of near-synonyms as well polysemous items. It is important to note that

the offered model takes into account stylistic peculiarities of near-synonyms, style

“… [being] one of the most difficult of lexical phenomena to account for, since it

affects the text at a pragmatic level and is highly influenced by context” [4]. Concepts

are depicted as regular rectangles, whereas stylistic dimensions and attitudes are

depicted as rounded rectangles and their values are in the rectangles with unmarked

borders. The peripheral concepts and core denotation together form a directed graph

of concepts linked by relations. The core includes several concepts that are not

actually lexicalized by any of the words in the cluster.

The figure shows the directed graph where peripheral concepts are linked to the

core concept. In the case of nouns united by the conventional umbrella term

marriage, it became possible to distinguish seven large areas (in my model peripheral

ones) that cover the lexico-semantic area of the given representation.

Figure 1. The cluster of marriage nouns

The peripheral concepts represent what a word in the cluster can potentially

express, in relation to its near-synonyms and commonalities as well as differences

between the polysemic variations. It should be noted that the provided model treats

all peripheral concepts as equal at the point of departure. The analysis has made it

possible to distinguish the following concepts: 1) union; 2) rite, ceremony; 3)

sacrament; 4) state; 5) relationship, 6) institution as an abstraction and 7) festivities

which respectively form seven semantic fields around the main concept. The concept

rite, ceremony has proven to be the most salient one in the clustered model as it is

shared by all lexical items except for wedlock. However, various lexical concepts

manifest different profiling attributes, styles and application levels. Thus, nuptial(s)

has an additional value of an elaborate ceremony and is more rhetorical than

wedding; espousal(s) conveys the additional dimension of spirituality and is archaic;

matrimony is a more appropriate term in religious and sometimes legal use, therefore

it demonstrates two stylistic dimensions of religious and legal. Meanwhile marriage

and wedding exhibit no additional connotational or denotational meaning. Marriage,

matrimony and wedlock bear the denotational meaning of state with wedlock

demonstrating the highest network of linked concepts. In wedlock such actors as

religious or legal bodies usually sanction the state or relationship, the lexical item

itself is chiefly archaic or legal. Relationship node of marriage is linked to two

peripheral attributes: spiritual or religious. Among the synonyms only marriage

denotes the institution as an abstraction. Marriage as well as wedding has the

denotational extension of the core meaning by including the close and intimate union

between two elements. Marriage goes even further by extending the meaning by

introducing two actors of the same sex, which is the most recent extension of the

meaning among the analyzed items.

The conducted analysis covers but a small part of available linguistic knowledge

about the lexical items representing marriage. However, to get a full grasp of

linguistic phenomena, it is worth considering a subject-based language phenomena

analysis where the reference point is the speaker. The approach was highly promoted

by G. Guillome back in 1917, which in its turn was a continuation of French

psychological linguistics. Enunciation that implies “activating a language by an

individual usage act of a speaker who mobilizes a language for his own use”

[1, p.80], became a focal point of study. Every individual act of fitting a language

immerses the speaker into his speech act and it is the speaker’s presence in his

enunciation that makes each occurrence of discourse an internal centre of reference

[1].

L. W. Langacker states that “language is held to refer to those aspects of

cognitive organization in which resides a speaker’s grasp of established linguistic

convention” [9, p.57]. It is the interface between usage and convention that induces

the language change and is “… the crucible of linguistic structure” [9, p.66].

Therefore, a number of problems are still left to be further researched such as the

similarity of conceptual structures, context-depending nature of lexical choice

including structural choices which determine the style. The variety of linguistic units

activating a certain concept also deserve further research as following

R. W. Langacker [9], I believe that there exists no set limit on the amount of

phonological signal used to activate commonly accepted interpretations, with phrases

as well as such bulky combinations as sentences mapping the construals.

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Статья отправлена: 13.03.2014г.

© Крацило Соломія Олександрівна