Sense Relation - Sameness Of Meaning

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The concepts synonymy and paraphrase describe a semantic relationship which is sameness of meaning. Sameness of meaning can hold true for words as well as for more complex expressions like phrases and sentences. Further, hyponymy and entailment are concepts dealing with meaning inclusion. Both categories – sameness in meaning and meaning inclusion meeting certain conditions fall together, which will be explain later. Examples for words: (1) He {almost/ nearly} finished his work (2) It is {likely/ probably} that I won’t be able to go to work tomorrow (3) He wore a {ultramarine/scarab} blue shirt The words in the curly brackets have almost the same meaning. Examples for sentences: (1) I took off my hat I took my hat off (2) She wrote her name down She wrote down her name (3) My mother made a cake The cake was made by my mother The given pairs have approximately the same meaning. Afer mentioning what hyponymy, synonymy, entailment and paraphrase have in common – sameness of meaning and/ or meaning inclusion - as a sense relation - I would like to explain each concept more closely in order be able to concretize my introductory statements. SYNONYMY The relationship between two predicates having the same sense is called synonymy. (Predicates are words or sequences of words that can pose as the predicator of a sentence. The state or process in which the referring expressions are involved is described by the predicator. Predicators can be adjectives (blue, awake), verbs (sleep,smell), preposition (on, in front of) and nouns (shark, genius). If we have the sentence The manager is a shark - shark would be the predicator and the manager would be the referring expression.) Perfect synonymy can only be applied if the sense of the two predicates is identical. Finding examples for this sense
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