The Interplay of Synonymy and Polysemy

truth-functional
meaning
. But Tuggy argues that the most relevant type of 
meaning is 
imagic meaning
. He would argue that even though 
father 
and 
daddy 
refer to the 
same person, they do not really mean (exactly) the same thing and that speakers are aware of 
this difference. Since truth conditions do not capture meaning in its entirety, it is not clear 
why truth-conditions should be at the center of defining synonymy (Goldberg 1995:103). 
The sentences in (1) above illustrate different stances on so-called extra-linguistic 
factors. Cruse (1986) states that connotation differences, including formality, register, and 
style, are peripheral and irrelevant to truth-conditions. Even though 
father 
and 
daddy 
can be 
said to differ in formality, they are still cognitive synonyms (Cruse 1986:207). Researchers 
who see no reason to limit meaning to only denotational aspects would disagree. For 
example, Goldberg (1995) invokes the Principle of No Synonymy. This states that if two 

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constructions are syntactically different then they must also be semantically or pragmatically 
different (1995:67). To authors such as Goldberg, differences in pragmatics are just as 
relevant as semantic differences in accounting for language.
A final issue affecting decisions on synonymy is the fact that words tend to have 
specific collocational and selectional restrictions. Often these differences in collocations are 
not meaning-based, but seem to be arbitrary. This poses a problem for the substitutability test: 
words that express similar meanings sometimes cannot be interchanged without making the 
sentence ungrammatical (Miller & Fellbaum 1991:202). Again, there are two ways to deal 
with this phenomenon. Cruse (1986:279) states that collocational restrictions are “co-
occurrence restrictions which are irrelevant to truth-conditions”, and therefore words may 
have different collocations and still be considered synonyms. Another option is to highlight 
collocational patterns as differences in synonyms. Dąbrowska (2009:10) begins with a set of 
synonyms and uses collocational patterns to elucidate the contrasts that exist between them. 
Synonymy is a semantic relation that exists between separate lexical items. 
Classifications of synonymy depend in large part on the assumptions made regarding the 
elements that are relevant to meaning. Some authors have posited three types of synonymy. 
Others have described synonymy as existing on a scale of similarity. Syntactic context plays 
an important role, since synonyms often appear in the same types of sentences, though there 
are also cases of collocational restrictions that limit the possibilities of substitutability. Even 
though there are issues that come into play when trying to assess the semantic similarity and 
syntactic substitutability of words, both factors are consistently used in studies on synonyms.