8.1 The same meaning and function

Synonyms are commonly understood as existing on word level, or lexeme level. As illustrated in the quote above, it is possible to have phrases being synonymous with words, phrases with phrases, etc. In fact, any lexical entry qualifies, i.e. we could also meaningfully describe synonymous affixes, function words or even entire constructions or syntactic patterns. The essential property of a set of synonyms is that they have the same meaning. In modern usage-based theories, such as Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar, the lines between meaning and function get blurred. One main idea is that the way we use words and the contexts they are found in defines their meaning.

Those frameworks do not assume an objective reality and meanings based on truth conditions and referents that exist outside language. Instead, meanings are understood in terms of construal, that is the way reality is perceived subjectively. The idea is that we don’t call a book a book because there is a group of objects that exists independently from language, but because there are objects in our experience that we perceive of as book. This might not sound like a very useful description, but it elegantly captures meanings which are difficult to anchor in the “real world”. Just think of unicorns, orcs or ghosts. We can communicate information about those creatures even though we lack hard evidence for their existence. We might even disagree whether there is an actual referent in the real world, as is the case for ghosts. What’s more, our communication about them isn’t any different from that of “real” objects. unicorn is a noun like horse with the same set of affixes, obeying the same syntactic rules. If we base meaning in human experience rather than objective truths about reality, we can explain lexemes describing fantastic creatures without having to assume multiple realities, which would have been the traditional approach.

If meaning is bound to experience, and we use language to construe those experiences, meanings become defined by the context of use. In some sense, the way we use a word defines its meaning. In order to explain synonyms, we have to assume that they have the same meaning, i.e. the same, or almost the same, use.