An Overview of the Concept and Use of Synonymy in English and Arabic

Abstract

Synonymy is a phenomenon that is widely spread in both English and Arabic. It is defined as "two or more lexical items which have the same meaning if they can replace each other without any change in the meaning of that context.  For example tall and high are synonymous in: a tall building and a high building whereas they are not in a structure such as a tall boy, since high cannot be used instead of tall to indicate the same meaning. The same is true in Arabic, for example,/alhrb/ 'war' and /alhiӠa/  'war' are conceptually synonymous but they are not in: /alhrbu annfsia/ and /alhiӠa annfsia/ 'psychological war'. Thus, synonymy remains a problem in terms of its identification and delimitation. Moreover, the relative size of synonymy in English as compared to Arabic has not been investigated yet to the best of my knowledge.

     Arab linguists fall in two opposing stands regarding synonymy: Those who defend the existence of synonymy and justify its existence with the richness of the bases in the language, the different dialects used to refer to the same object or to historical developments where obsolete words were replaced by new words that have the same meaning. The other group of linguists represents those who defend the non-existence of synonymy.

     The available information shows a lack of words identical in meaning and this confirms the absence of the so-called full synonymy, moreover, partial synonymy is widespread in both languages but more pronounced in Arabic than in English.