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Synonyms and syntaxRichard Hudsonlast changed 9 Feb 2009 Bibliographical informationRichard Hudson, And Rosta, Jasper Holmes, Nik Gisborne. Synonyms and syntax (1996) Journal of Linguistics 32, 439-446 AbstractRecent work in a variety of different theoretical traditions has tended to emphasise the close match between syntax and semantics (Dixon 1991; Langacker 1987, 1992, 1995; Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1991, 1992; Wierzbicka 1988). It is very easy to be left with the impression that, if only we could analyse the relevant syntactic and semantic structures correctly, this match would be total. We share the general enthusiasm for the successes scored so far, but (with Fillmore 1986, Jackendoff 1993 and others) we also believe that there is an irreducible residue of cases which can never be explained. The purpose of this note is to document some of the clearest examples from English that we know (some of which are already well-known but deserve to be repeated). What all our examples have in common is that they involve pairs of `synonyms' (we comment on this notion below) which are syntactically different. Such cases deserve attention as the limiting case at one end of the spectrum of possible relations between syntax and semantics: if these two levels always match perfectly, in the sense that syntactic behaviour can always be predicted from semantics, then surely words which share the same semantics should also have identical syntax. For example, if LIKELY and PROBABLE are synonymous, then they should have the same valency (subcategorization), but this is not so: LIKELY allows a TO-infinitive with subject-to-subject raising, but PROBABLE does not. |