p. 53-67The purpose of this paper is to present a series of
interlinguistic inequi valences and to specifically anal yse one of them; this
leads us to revise one of the most important intralinguistic phenomena
with relevance in contrastive studies, synonymy, by means of an empirical
methodology based on corpora. What is advocated here is the fact that
even two such similar words as almost and nearly may be dissimilar in the
realm of language use; they are very close in meaning and they usually
correspond to a single ítem in other languages, for example in Spanish, but
their behaviour differs in many respects.
A great deal has been said about the fact that translators, teachers
and students of foreign languages sometimes cannot avoid thinking in
terms of words, a tendency that is very much disapproved of and very
much fought against by themselves. One of the reasons might be the
influence of the written medium, where all words are set apart from one
another by means of a blank space and another could be the way our mind
works, trying to structure all knowledge. Whatever the reason, it is a risky
but daily habit to give one-word translations for words in another language
without paying attention to the context in which they occur.
This paper aims at raising the issue of intralinguistic synonymy
and its relevance in the field of Contrastive Studies, Second Language
Teaching and Translation. We advocate the idea that synonymy and other
semantic and linguistic phenomena must be observed in the light of
language use, within a functional approach and through empirical and
descriptive research. The first part will consist of a theoretical exposition
of the two most relevant facts concerning this subject, which are
interlinguistic and intralinguistic relations of linguistic items, that is, their
links with similar words in other languages on the one hand and their
connection to similar words in the same language on the other. And the
second part will provide sorne empirical evidence that shows that two socalled
synonyms are not so to such a great extent as has always been
considered and should therefore be taught differently.S
