Қазақ мемлекеттік қыздар
педагогикалық университеті Хабаршы №3 (51), 2014 ж.
49
scrutinize the use of ‘deep’ and ‘profound’. His research is especially valid because he bases his
research on lexicographic words, corpus data and importance. The wide range of sources and the
number of them is what makes this valid.
The conclusions: ‘Deep’ and ‘profound’ show a difference in collocability, that is, they
tend to collocate with different words. Deep tends to collocate with words of affection,
conviction, feeling, regret, satisfaction, sorrow… Whereas ‘profound’ tends to collocate with
words of difference, distaste, effect, failure, influence… They enter different collocations
because they mean slightly different things. They specialize in certain areas of meaning and that
makes them slightly different. He also talks about metaphorical status. Metaphorically speaking,
they can mean position on the one hand or quality of depth on the other. Only ‘deep’ enters for
the position metaphor, but the quality of depth can be expressed by both of them.
Ex: deep structure (profound structure
He was deep (profound) in thought
It was deep (profound) in the Middle Ages
Deep / profound learning
Deep / profound sleep
Intellectual - emotive dichotomy: ‘deep’ and ‘profound’ tend to relate respectively to
intellectual and emotive words. The idea is that ‘deep’ tends to collocate with emotive nouns,
whereas ‘profound’ tends to collocate with intellectual words.
There is a difference in the degree of depth and intensity of these words. ‘Profound’ is
deeper that ‘deep’. When both are possible, then there is a distinction.
Ex: He has a deep understanding of the matter (‘pretty good’)
He has a profound understanding of the matter (‘very good’)
English words associations give us a very useful way to prove this. There are nouns whose
inherent meaning is superlative. With such a noun you can only have ‘profound’ because it
means deeper.
Ex: profound distaste *deep distaste
Profound repugnance *deep repugnance
Of course in terms of truth-conditions one entails the other one but not vice versa, that is
‘profound’ includes ‘deep’ but not vice versa.
Ex: His profound insight into human nature has stood the test of centuries
His deep insight into human nature has stood the test of centuries.
His deep insight into human nature has stood the test of centuries. *
His profound insight into human nature has stood the test of centuries
Synonymy is understood within mutual entailment (A-B) but ‘deep’ and ‘profound’
doesn’t correspond to this. Native speakers feel that ‘profound’ is stylistically more elevated or
more formal that deep? So with all this evidence it is impossible to say that they are
synonymous. This is why Person gives the following figure as the analysis for them.
Concrete ‘situated, coming abstract; abstract from, or extending intellectual; emotive far
below the strongly; surface emotive.
Stylistic Attributes (SA): informal SA; formal.
In Person’s model we have three categories: CC, TA, SA. The thing is that not all words
include SA box, so it’s left open. Person also reviewed other examples analyzed by Warren.
Ex: child / brat child CC brat TA
Child’ and ‘brat’ are an example of connotative variant in Warren. They are given as
variants but if we apply the test of hyponymy we see that it works. ‘Brat’ is a kind of ‘child’ but
not vice versa. ‘Brat’ includes ‘child’ plus the feature ‘bad-mannered. Person finds the
collocation in which ‘brat’ appears; it tends to appear with adjectives that reinforces this feature
of bad-mannered what proves that that atom of meaning (…)
Казахский государственный женский
педагогический университет Вестник №3(51), 2014 г.
50
The same happens with ‘woman’ and ‘lady’.
Ex: She is a woman, but she is not a lady.
She is a lady, but she is not a woman
Person questions the fact that two words can be synonymous out of the blue. He defends
contextual information as the key to determine if two words are synonymous or not.
Ex: readable: legible
At to what extent can we say that they are synonyms?
readable:
(of handwriting or point) able to be read easily’
pleasurable or interesting to read’
legible:
(of handwriting or print) ‘able to be read easily’
They are only synonymous when they mean ‘able to be read easily’
«The child, quite obviously, would not be expected to produce a composition, but would
be expected to know the alphabet, where the full stops and commas are used, and be able to write
in a readable / legible manner, something like, ‘The cat sat on the mat’».
«It is not easy to see why her memory should have faded, especially as she wrote a most
readable / *legible autobiography which went quickly through several editions»
Legible; readable; able to with pleasure; be read’ and /or; interest.
They share senses number 1 but to ‘readable’ it’s also added sense number 2. This claims
that in some contexts they are fully interchangeable, but we have also to take into account their
stylistic feature and the register.
In principle, scientific words have discrete meanings.
Ex: mercury: quicksilver
They appear as full synonyms because they say that their relationship is that of mutual
inclusion (A-B).
Conceptually, the concept ‘mercury’ can be expressed with both words. However, style
draws the line between both words. Native speakers and corpora of data give us what we have in
the following figure:
Mercury: formal, quicksilver; scientific whitish; fluid informal; metal.
Mercury formal, scientific (Romance origin): Quicksilver informal (Saxon origin)
However something peculiar has happened with this words. The popular word
‘quicksilver’ is starting to disappear and what usually happens is that the formal words are the
one that disappears. But in this case, it is the contrary.
Cigarette: fag
Cigarette fag
Tube with
General tobacco in slang’
It for smoking’ ‘narrow, made of finely cut tobacco rolled in thin paper’
This figure contains not only CC but typical attributes too.
So, the conclusion is that some words of a language don’t lend themselves well to the
analysis in terms of semantic fields. Other important idea is the difficulty of finding finite sets of
words. In any case, there’s an internal contradiction between the ideas of a set with the
structuring of words of a language. A set is a close set. A word can belong to several fields
depending on the organizing concept. Speakers of the language clearly identify the central
example but not the peripheral ones. This doesn’t mean that it would never happen that. The
degree of flexibility in the discrepancy of the categorization of words is smaller.
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