Big and Large as Near Synonyms

Abstract

Palmer mentioned that the existence of Absolute synonymy is rare; however, near synonyms are numerous. Furthermore, there are no real synonyms where words will have exact same meaning; where she provided five ways in which possible synonyms can be seen to differ. Following-up an earlier study of the near synonyms high and tall that Taylor discovered near synonyms, exhibit the pattern of dominant-recessive co-extension: High is the dominant term for the vertical dimension and tall the recessive term. High is readily applied to a wide range of different kinds of entities, whereas the distribution of tall is skewed towards use with human nominals. Also, high is more frequent in the language than tall.
Taylor suggestions for further research to observe whether there are any other pairs of near synonyms exhibit the pattern of dominant-recessive co-extension. Therefore, this paper examines that another pair of near synonyms, big and large, exhibit the pattern of dominant-recessive co-extension. This report examines that big is more dominant co-extension than large is.