Synonymy from a linguistic-cognitive perspective. Measuring semantic distance

Abstract

The synonymy, understood as the ability to exchange two words in a given context without loss original meaning, has presented a number of theoretical and technical issues in linguistics throughout the twentieth century. Given these controversies, measuring the semantic distance between words is emerging as a good way to solve this problem. These proposal puts perspective synonymy as a gradual and progressive phenomenon. The hypothesis underlying this work is that the degree of synonymy is established as an extreme case of as many shared the concept referenced word attributes. Thus the correspondence between synonymy as it is presented in dictionaries and thesaurus and synonymy experimentally obtained from the distances  established. For this work “Normas de Producción de Atributos Semánticos en Castellano” obtained from 900 university students were used. Semantic distances to 60 words belonging to the rules and dictionaries by calculating the cosine between vectors in a n- dimensional to determine the degree of coincidence or synonymy space were obtained. Considered synonyms for words  fluctuate dictionaries semantic distance between 0.6 and 0.95. These results suggest that the distances between the pairs considered synonymous for dictionaries 0.9 was higher than when they belong to one specific subcategory. In the words of a close distance 0.8, warns belonging to the same category of base and when they scored between 0.6 and 0.8 belong to the same category taken in a broad sense.