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<Paper uid="J02-2001">
  <Title>c(c) 2002 Association for Computational Linguistics Near-Synonymy and Lexical Choice</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="109" end_page="111" type="intro">
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4 The classic opposition of denotation and connotation is not precise enough for our needs here. The
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    <Paragraph position="0"> denotation of a word is its literal, explicit, and context-independent meaning, whereas its connotation is any aspect that is not denotational, including ideas that color its meaning, emotions, expressed attitudes, implications, tone, and style. Connotation is simply too broad and ambiguous a term. It often seems to be used simply to refer to any aspect of word meaning that we don't yet understand well enough to formalize.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  Computational Linguistics Volume 28, Number 2 continuous/intermittent (Wine {seeped  |dripped} from the barrel), many are not. In fact, denotational variation involves mostly differences that lie not in simple features but in full-fledged concepts or ideas--differences in concepts that relate roles and aspects of a situation. For example, in Figure 1, &amp;quot;severe criticism&amp;quot; is a complex concept that involves both a criticizer and a criticized, the one who made the error. Moreover, two words can differ in the manner in which they convey a concept. Enemy and foe, for instance, differ in the emphasis that they place on the concepts that compose them, the former stressing antagonism and the latter active warfare rather than emotional reaction (Gove 1984).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Other words convey meaning indirectly by mere suggestion or implication. There is a continuum of indirectness from suggestion to implication to denotation; thus slip &amp;quot;carries a stronger implication of inadvertence&amp;quot; than mistake. Such indirect meanings are usually peripheral to the main meaning conveyed by an expression, and it is usually difficult to ascertain definitively whether or not they were even intended to be conveyed by the speaker; thus error merely &amp;quot;suggests guilt&amp;quot; and a mistake is &amp;quot;not always blameworthy.&amp;quot; Differences in denotation can also be fuzzy, rather than clear-cut. The difference between woods and forest is a complex combination of size, primitiveness, proximity to civilization, and wildness.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  finite set of dimensions on which all words can be compared. Many stylistic dimensions have been proposed by Hovy (1988), Nirenburg and Defrise (1992), Stede (1993), and others. Table 1 illustrates two of the most common dimensions: inebriated is formal whereas pissed is informal; annihilate is a more forceful way of saying ruin.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> 2.3.3 Expressive Variations. Many near-synonyms differ in their marking as to the speaker's attitude to their denotation: good thing or bad thing. Thus the same person might be described as skinny, if the speaker wanted to be deprecating or pejorative, slim or slender, if he wanted to be more complimentary, or thin if he wished to be neutral. A hindrance might be described as an obstacle or a challenge, depending upon how depressed or inspired the speaker felt about the action that it necessitated.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5">  A word can also indirectly express the emotions of the speaker in a possibly finite set of emotive &amp;quot;fields&amp;quot;; daddy expresses a stronger feeling of intimacy than dad or father. Some words are explicitly marked as slurs; a slur is a word naming a group of people, the use of which implies hatred or contempt of the group and its members simply by virtue of its being marked as a slur.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6">  restrictions upon deployment that come from other elements of the utterance and, reciprocally, restrictions that they place upon the deployment of other elements. In either case, the restrictions are independent of the meanings of the words themselves.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7">  The 5 &amp;quot;A 'wood' is smaller than a 'forest', is not so primitive, and is usually nearer to civilization. This means that a 'forest' is fairly extensive, is to some extent wild, and on the whole not near large towns or cities. In addition, a 'forest' often has game or wild animals in it, which a 'wood' does not, apart from the standard quota of regular rural denizens such as rabbits, foxes and birds of various kinds&amp;quot; (Room 1985, page 270).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8">  Edmonds and Hirst Near-Synonymy and Lexical Choice restrictions may be either collocational, syntactic, or selectional--that is, dependent either upon other words or constituents in the utterance or upon other concepts denoted. Collocational variation involves the words or concepts with which a word can be combined, possibly idiomatically. For example, task and job differ in their collocational patterns: one can face a daunting task but not [?]face a daunting job. This is a lexical restriction, whereas in selectional restrictions (or preferences) the class of acceptable objects is defined semantically, not lexically. For example, unlike die, pass away may be used only of people (or anthropomorphized pets), not plants or animals: [?]Many cattle passed away in the drought.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> Variation in syntactic restrictions arises from differing syntactic subcategorization. It is implicit that if a set of words are synonyms or near-synonyms, then they are of the same syntactic category.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10">  Some of a set of near-synonyms, however, might be subcategorized differently from others. For example, the adjective ajar may be used predicatively, not attributively (The door is ajar; [?]the ajar door), whereas the adjective open may be used in either position. Similarly, verb near-synonyms (and their nominalizations) may differ in their verb class and in the alternations that they they may undergo (Levin 1993). For example, give takes the dative alternation, whereas donate does not: Nadia gave the Van Gogh to the museum; Nadia gave the museum the Van Gogh; Nadia donated the Van Gogh to the museum; [?]Nadia donated the museum the Van Gogh. Unlike the other kinds of variation, collocational, syntactic, and selectional variations have often been treated in the literature on lexical choice, and so we will have little more to say about them here.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="111" end_page="111" type="sub_section">
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2.4 Cross-Linguistic Near-Synonymy
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      <Paragraph position="0"> Near-synonymy rather than synonymy is the norm in lexical transfer in translation: the word in the target language that is closest to that in the source text might be a near-synonym rather than an exact synonym. For example, the German word Wald is similar in meaning to the English word forest, but Wald can denote a rather smaller and more urban area of trees than forest can; that is, Wald takes in some of the English word woods as well, and in some situations, woods will be a better translation of Wald than forest. Similarly, the German Geh&amp;quot;olz takes in the English copse and the &amp;quot;smaller&amp;quot; part of woods. We can think of Wald, Geh&amp;quot;olz, forest, woods, and copse as a cross-linguistic near-synonym group.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Hence, as with a group of near-synonyms from a single language, we can speak of the differences in a group of cross-linguistic near-synonyms. And just as there are reference books to advise on the near-synonym groups of a single language, there are also books to advise translators and advanced learners of a second language on cross-linguistic near-synonymy. As an example, we show in Figures 2 and 3 (abridgements of) the entries in Farrell (1977) and Batchelor and Offord (1993) that explicate, from the perspective of translation to and from English, the German and French near-synonym clusters that correspond to the English cluster for error that we showed in</Paragraph>
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    <Section position="2" start_page="111" end_page="111" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.5 Summary
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      <Paragraph position="0"> We know that near-synonyms can often be intersubstituted with no apparent change of effect on a particular utterance, but, unfortunately, the context-dependent nature</Paragraph>
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