Cross - level synonymy

The word “synonymy” is used here in a very broad and untraditional sense; it is not restricted to lexical linguistic signs, i.e., words, but covers also relations of equivalence between units below the word level, i.e., morphemes and non-phonemic signs. For instance, the ending -en in oxen can be regarded as synonymous with the standard ending -s in cows . In my view, semantic description could gain from such a redefined and enlarged concept of synonymy. In this article I will try to show that the relation of synonymy (in this broad sense) can obtain across the borderline separating the word level and the “subword” level. I have chosen to base the presentation mainly on examples in my mother tongue, Swedish, but to some extent also draw on Russian. However, material from any language would do, since we are dealing here with universal linguistic phenomena. Traditionally, as already mentioned, synonymy can only hold between words, and, more precisely, between words belonging to the same part of speech, for example: (1) enorm ‘enormous’ — ofantlig ‘huge’; glo ‘gaze’ — stirra ‘stare’ This is the classic form of synonymy, covered by, for instance, synonym dictionaries. Now to more untraditional types of synonymy. The first type that comes to mind is so-called "syntactic derivation",1 including, among other things, the formation of abstract nouns, for instance: (2) ankomma ‘arrive’ — ankomst ‘arrival’; god ‘good’ — godhet ‘goodness’ Such a relationship is also sometimes regarded as a case of synonymy. Not everyone acknowledges, however, that there is no semantic distinction between an abstract noun and the verb or adjective it is derived from. Those who are reluctant to accept this view think, evidently, that there can be no full synonymy between words belonging to different parts of speech.2 I do not adhere to this point of view: I think it is possible to ascribe the differences between arrive and arrival exclusively to syntactic properties. Now, the scope can be widened on the word level to include pairs containing a preposition and a verb, like in — contain, around — surround. Such pairs are not normally considered synonymous, but if we do so it may be a way of accounting for paraphrases like (3) Det finns fel i boken. ‘There are errors in the book.’ (4) Boken innehåller fel. ‘The book contains errors.’