The Interplay of Synonymy and Polysemy

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1 | 
Chapter 1. Introduction 
Spanish has four verbs (
arrojar, echar, lanzar 
and 
tirar
) that can be roughly described 
as meaning ‘to throw’. They are listed as synonyms in thesauri (DPA, DSA), and many 
speakers would recognize them as such since they can appear in the same sentences 
expressing similar notions, as exemplified in (1).
(1) 
Arrojé el papel a la basura. 
‘I threw the paper in the trash.’ 
Eché el papel a la basura. 
Lancé el papel a la basura. 
Tiré el papel a la basura. 
These verbs are also polysemous; that is, they not only mean ‘to throw’ but can 
express other meanings. For example, 
tirar
can express the shooting of a firearm
 
and
 arrojar
in my dialect (of Honduras) is mostly used to mean ‘to vomit’. The purpose of this study is to 
explore how the issues of polysemy and synonymy affect the structure of language. 
The study uses corpus material and data from a questionnaire to explore the types of 
uses that each verb can adopt. Understanding the meaning of a word can be achieved, at least 
in part, by analyzing its use by native speakers as, for example, in a corpus and in 
psycholinguistic experiments. Both corpus and psycholinguistic data on the 
throw
-verbs in 
Spanish were collected and subjected to statistical testing. The tests help to determine 
whether the apparent differences between the verbs were in fact statistically significant and 
not due to chance. Statistical tests also measure the extent to which we can state that the 
results of our studies are applicable to the language as a whole (Tummers et al. 2005:242). 
The data and the statistical tests are a starting point for analyzing the characteristics of 
how these verbs are used. Previous researchers have proposed refined views on what 
classifies as synonymy and provided descriptions of different types of synonymic relations. 
One of the goals of this study is to discover whether these verbs can be described as 
synonymous, and the exact nature of that synonymy. In other words, what does it mean when 
a speaker accepts these words as synonymous?
The study also explores the many meaning extensions that each verb can adopt. The 
data shows that each verb can express several distinct notions. The study focuses heavily on 
trying to make sense of all these meaning extensions. Though the uses that a verb will or can 
adopt are not entirely predictable, I will try to show that the uses can be semantically 

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2 | 
motivated. A community of speakers can derive new and extended meanings from a central 
meaning for a verb.
The goal is not only to show the behavior of each verb and the semantic relations that 
exist between them, but at the same time describe the type of information that a speaker must 
know in order to use the language. As we will see, a speaker will know the meanings of each 
verb and the participant roles that are normally associated with each. And she will also be 
aware of the semantic connections that exist between all the various uses of each verb. The 
speaker will derive knowledge about the meaning of verbs, but also how it is used and how 
these different uses/meanings are interconnected and motivated. I choose to explore these 
specific Spanish verbs because they provide a good source of data to explore both the nature 
of synonymy and of polysemy, and the way in which speakers structure lexical knowledge.
I begin in chapter 2 by giving a general overview of previous theoretical work 
focusing on the issues of synonymy and polysemy. I also describe three general perspectives 
on lexical semantics and the structure that governs the knowledge of words. I end this chapter 
by describing the views I have adopted and attempt to justify those views with example 
analyses. Chapter 3 provides a detailed description of the methodology of this study. I 
performed three studies: two corpus studies and one questionnaire. In this chapter, I describe 
the data collection process and the statistical tools that were used to analyze the data.
The major portion of this study is concentrated in Chapter 4. Here I give a full 
description of the results of the statistical tests. The statistical tests evaluate and measure the 
effects found in the data. The focus then is on determining what these effects mean for the 
analysis of the 
throw-
verbs. By exploring the types of sentences that are associated with a 
verb, and noticing the semantics of each usage event, we can give a detailed description of a 
verb in use. Knowing a verb is knowing when and how it is used. A large part of this chapter 
also focuses on motivating the many uses of each verb. Instead of conceiving of the many 
meanings of a verb as a set of unconnected definitions, we can give structure to a verb’s 
lexical entry by describing the semantic connections that exist between all the uses.
In chapter 5 I describe certain types of constructions that help to explain the behavior 
of two of the verbs, namely 
lanzar 
and 
echar
. These verbs have more figurative uses, 
compared to 
arrojar 
and 
tirar
, and these figurative uses can be motivated by describing the 
constructions that help build light verb constructions and a type of idiom I have labeled 
semantically-schematic idioms. These two constructions account for some of the behavior of 
lanzar
and 
echar 
respectively. By describing these constructions, I wish to show a level of 
systematicity in the use of each verb.

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3 | 
Chapter 2. Theoretical Background 
Synonymy and polysemy are the two main topics of this thesis. Both synonymy (and 
other semantic relations between words) and polysemy have been the object of study of many 
researchers coming from a variety of theoretical viewpoints. On the topic of synonymy, 
linguists have described parameters and tests for determining whether two words classify as 
synonyms and also worked on categorizing synonyms. An overview of previous theoretical 
discussions on synonymy is given in §2.1. The topic of polysemy has also been discussed in 
depth in the literature. Researchers have attempted to pinpoint and describe the major 
characteristics of polysemy and the problems associated with distinguishing separate senses. 
The topic of polysemy is discussed in §2.2. 
This study also deals with the structure of language. Synonymy focuses on relations 
and connections that exist between separate lexical items, while polysemy concerns the 
information associated with a single lexical item. The theoretical tools we choose to adopt are 
important since they necessarily affect the type of analysis we can make. In §2.3 I describe 
three theories on lexical semantics. Each theory has its own conception of how meaning is 
structured, how it relates to syntactic expression and how to treat synonymy and polysemy. 
Then (§2.4) I detail the theoretical tools that are used throughout this thesis and provide 
justification for the choices based on the data under study.