PARAPHRASES

There are not only words that sound the same but have different meanings; there are also words that sound different but have the same or nearly the same meaning. Such words are called synonyms. Dictionaries of synonyms contain many hundreds of entries, such as:

                                Apathetic/phlegmatic/passive/sluggish/indifferent

                                Pedigree/ancestry/genealogy/descent/lineage

      There are no perfect synonyms ─ that is, no two words ever have exactly the same meaning. Still, the following pairs of sentences have very similar meanings.

                                I’ll be happy to come/I’ll be glad to come.

                                He’s sitting on the lounge/He’s sitting on the couch.

    Some individuals may always use lounge instead of couch. But if they know the two words they will understand both sentences and interpret them to mean the same thing. The degree of semantic similarity between words depend to a great extent on the number of semantic properties they share. Lounge and couch refer to the same type of object and share most, if not all, of semantic properties.

    There are words that have many semantic properties in common but that are not synonyms or near synonyms. Man and boy both refer to male humans; the meaning of boy includes the additional semantic property of ‘youth’ whereby it differs from the meaning of man. Thus semantic system of English permits you to say  A lounge is a couch or A couch is a lounge but not A man is a boy or A boy is a man, except when you wish to describe ‘boylike’ qualities of the man or ‘manlike’ qualities of the boy.

     Often a word with several meanings, called a polysemous word, will share one of its meanings with another word. Thus mature and ripe are synonymous when applied to fruit. Deep and profound are another such pair. Both apply to thought, but only deep applies to water. Sometimes words that are ordinarily opposites can mean the same thing in certain context; thus a good scare is the same as a bad scare. Similarly, a word with a positive meaning in one form, such as the adjective perfect, when used adverbially, undergoes  a ‘weakening’ effect, so that a ’perfectly good bicycle’ is neither perfect nor always good. ‘Perfectly good’ means something more like ‘adequate’.

      When synonyms occur in otherwise identical sentences, the sentences will be paraphrases. Sentences are paraphrases if they have the same meaning (except possibly for minor differences in emphasis). Thus the use of synonyms may create lexical paraphrases, just as the use of homonyms may create lexical ambiguity.

       Sentences  may also be paraphrases because of structural differences that are not essential to their meanings. A pair of sentences may be paraphrases in terms of logical relations, but differ in the matter of focus or in terms of the topic/comment structure. Thus the active sentence John kissed marry differs in meaning from the passive sentence Mary was kissed by John only in that John is the topic of the first, whereas Mary is the topic of the second. The two sentences may still be considered to be paraphrases.