Types of synonymic groups in Russian

Types of synonymic groups in Russian

Belov, Vadim

This research has two main purposes: 1) to distinguish structural types of synonymic groups; 2) to verify the headwords of synonymic groups as a linguistic or psycholinguistic concept. Typically, a headword has: 1) common semantic elements, 2) the highest frequency, and 3) no stylistic and emotional connotations. The main source of data is the results of two experiments and data from the Russian National Corpus. The subjects' task was to choose the main words of the submitted groups. We used 32 synonymic groups, taken from the Russian synonymic dictionaries: the first experiment contained 12 synonymic groups and the second had 20 synonymic groups. Forty-five subjects participated in the first experiment, 67 in the second experiment. We distinguished two types of synonymic groups with different structures. The first type (centric synonymic groups) consists of synonymic groups, the headword of which can be uniquely identified by experimental and corpus data. In such cases, the subjects unanimously determined the headword, and the headword is the most frequent word of the synonymic group. There are eight (67%) such groups in the first experiment and 14 such groups (70%) in the second experiment. The second type (non-centric synonymic groups) includes synonymic groups, in which the subjects were not able to choose the main word of the synonymic groups. There are four (33%) such groups in the first experiment and six such groups (30%) in the second experiment. It is impossible to distinguish the headword in non-centric synonymic groups. Such synonymic groups are integrated by a semantic gestalt based on a nonverbal semantic code. Formal and component analysis of non-central synonymic groups is not effective. Keywords: Russian language, synonymic groups

Article
PeerReviewed

2015-04-29

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