The Competition of Construing and Conventional Usage in the Use of Synonymy: An Analysis of Two sets of (Near)-synonymous Nouns Using both Corpus and Elicited Data

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The Competition of Construing and Conventional
Usage in the Use of Synonymy An Analysis of Two
sets of (Near)-synonymous Nouns Using both
Corpus and Elicited Data

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

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Present Study Corpus Analysis Results
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The Present Study Corpus Analysis Results
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The Present Study Corpus Analysis Results
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The Present Study Corpus Analysis Results
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The Present Study Corpus Analysis Results

• 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/f
  ilial duty (also civic duty). Yet the COCA data
  show that some speakers/writers use the word
  responsibility in such cases.

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The Present Study Corpus Analysis Results

• 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.

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The Present Study Procedures and Results

• 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 Järvikivis
  (2007) study, this study did not use an
  acceptability judgment, however.

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The Present Study Procedures and Results

• 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.

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The Present Study Procedures and Results

• 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

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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?

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The Present Study Solicited Data Analysis
Results

• 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/onomasiolog
  ical 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. Lets 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

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The Present Study Solicited Data Analysis
Results

• 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 theyre
  considering how much authority to give Congress
  voters, were talking about a very specific
  action that they will or wont be able to do.
  Another wrote Honestly, the other two just seem
  not to fit well. Power equates to ability
  here.

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The Present Study Solicited Data Analysis
Results

• 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 Ive 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.

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The Present Study Solicited Data Analysis
Results

• 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 Im just
  used to hearing right to vote (equated with
  suffrage).

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The Present Study Solicited Data Analysis
Results

• 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.

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The Present Study Solicited Data Analysis
Results

• In these examples, two vying forces were clearly
  at work in many contexts, conventional usage
  (frequency/entrenchment) wins out in others, a
  speaker/writers 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.

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Conclusion

• The study has shown that construing and
  conventional usage (frequency/entrenchment/onomasi
  ological 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.

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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.

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Selected References

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