synonymy

 What’s the difference between a violin and a fiddle? No one minds if you spill beer on a fiddle.

A few days ago I was trying to exit a parking lot but couldn't find the paying machine.  Luckily one of the parking lot employees was just passing by.  He was very helpful: "look over there.  See this white thing with the hole in it? Put your ticket in that  hole."  I looked in the direction he was pointing at, but couldn't see anything white with a hole in it.  At a closer inspection I realized that right in front of me was a white paying machine with a slot for the ticket.  What confused me was that I was looking for a hole, a round thing.

As I'm currently working on a presentation about crystallized knowledge (the 7^th in the nine presentation series about cognitive abilities) this incident made me think about synonymy.

What's really the difference between a slot and a hole? A hole doesn't have to be round.  Is a slot a kind of a hole?  Maybe a slot has to be elongated.  But a hole can also be elongated (to a degree?).  Does a hole have to go all the way through  -  but a slot doesn't?  What about the difference between a slot and a crack? a slot and a slit?

Philip Edmonds and Graeme Hirst address these issues in their paper Near synonymy and lexical choice.  Computational Linguistics 2002 vol.28 no. 2  pp. 105-144

http://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Edmonds+Hirst-2002.pdf

Here are a few points from this paper:

In a given language, all the words which express neighboring ideas help define one another’s meaning.

Synonyms are words that are identical in “central semantic traits” and differ, if at all, only in “peripheral traits.” But how can we specify just how much similarity of central traits and dissimilarity of peripheral traits is allowed?

On the one hand, any two words are synonyms (because every word denotes a “thing”).   But on the other hand, no two words could ever be known to be synonyms, because, even at a fine grain, apparent synonyms might be further distinguishable by a still more fine-grained representation.

As a possible solution to this problem, the authors introduce the idea of granularity of representation of word meaning.   Granularity is the level of detail used to describe or represent the meanings of a word.    Granularity is essential to the concept of cognitive synonymy, as which pairs of words are cognitive synonyms depends on the granularity with which we represent their meanings.

The meaning of any word must have inherent aspects.   But nuances of meaning can only be fully understood as differences and relations between that word and one or more of its synonyms.  

According to Merriam Webster dictionary, a hole is an opening through something.  A slot is a narrow opening or groove.  A crack is a thin line in the surface of something that is broken but not separated into pieces; a very narrow space or opening between two things or two parts of something. A slit is a long, narrow cut or opening in something.

These four words have the same inherent coarse aspect (opening).  In this level of coarse granularity, they are related words (far synonyms?)   But their fine grained  differences  define each of them precisely.

Why is this important?

Words and concepts are the building blocks of thinking.  Synonymy helps us  make fine word distinctions.  Being able to distinguish between nuances makes us better thinkers.  It also enables us to communicate our meanings with more clarity and precision.  Having a rich "arsenal" of synonyms helps us overcome retrieval lapses as we have alternative forms of expressions.

Another thought:
It's possible that there are individual differences (and possibly developmental differences) in the granularity of the representation of word meanings.  This could explain why some people judge a word pair as synonyms while others don't.  It's possible that the former represent those words with a coarser level of granularity than the latter.