Contenu du sommaire : La synonimie, sous la direction de Antoinette Balibar-Mrabti

Question of synonymy is very important in logic, rhetoric and grammar in the Middle Ages. Collections of Synonyma and Aequivoca, written in verses, such as those of Jean de Garlande, with their commentaries in Latin and with annotations in native languages, last over centuries. This article studies how, at the Renaissance, they open way to a new pedagogy of languages.

Classification of free sentences brings into play a form of synonymy we call "abstract" synonymy. In contrast, frozen sentences bring into play "concrete" synonymy. Metaphoric uses of verbs, which are relatively fixed, request treatments that are intermediary between these two forms of synonymy.

From an electronic dictionary of 25.610 verbal entries, based on syntactic properties of verbs, their lexical components and their derivations, a classification of French verbs was established, which groups verbs into 14 large semantico-syntactic classes and 248 syntactic types. Thus emerges a hierarchy of degrees of syntactic synonymy.

We compare synonymy relations to transformational relations. Transformations are the equivalence relations defined by Z. S. Harris. They include adjectivizations and nominalizations, they move entirely derivational morphology into the domain of syntax. These transformations operate between elementary sentences and they make use of support verbs. With this extension, we show that synonymy relations can be viewed as generalizing basic transformations.

This article gives a survey of the possible interpretations of word synonymy, which is relevant within the framework of a theory of denotation , but not in a theory of meaning (connotations, registers). Word synonymy dealing with coded items and sentence synonymy dealing with free items are of no interest to linguists. What allows meaning to be assessed is the coded → uncoded relation, in which the analytical uncoded item is the interpretant (Ch. S. Peirce). As the interpretant is made of words, the word is therefore the semantic unit (and not the metalinguistic seme).

One observes a certain scepticism among most philosophers of logic regarding synonymy. This is perhaps because they are generally too demanding in the determination of a criterion of synonymy. Should the relation of synonymy thus be weakened or else should its domain of application be restricted to certain contexts, certain language games or certain possible worlds ? This, it would seem, is the fundamental question today.

The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze the different meanings of the adjective curieux, (both "curious" and "strange") and the relationship between the adjective placement and it's meaning. We argue that adjective positioning is to be considered as a grammaticalisation process resulting in a semantic change, both in synchrony and in diachrony. We further compare cognitive theory that views metaphorical extensions as the main cause of meaning change to the theory that considers semantic changes to be a result of historical processes. A combination of both approaches is suggested.