Comparative analysis of synonyms and variants in Polish and Czech
Research material
The chains under inspection can be divided into three groups, in terms of their composition:
1. synonym chains, which are comprised of a loanword and one or more native synonyms,
2. variant chains, which are comprised of spelling and/or morphological variants of a loanword,
3. mixed chains, which are comprised of both synonyms and variant forms.
The Polish synonym chains have been chosen from Słownik spolszczeń i zapożyczeń 'A Dictionary of Loans and Polonized Words' according to the following criteria:
1. none of the elements of a chain should be a polysemous word (in a few cases exceptions have been allowed),
2. all elements in a chain should be frequent enough to perform collocation analysis,
3. each chain should have a translational equivalent in Czech,
4. both Polish and Czech chains should be potentially interesting for analysis.
The Polish variant chains have been selected from Słownik wyrazów obcych PWN 'A Dictionary of Borrowed Words'. Only the most common words have been chosen, in such a way that:
1. each chain had an equivalent in Czech,
2. each chain was interesting enough for further analysis,
3. the resulting selection was as diversified as possible, i.e. representing a broad spectrum of adaptation phenomena.
Variants differing solely in terms of a space or a hyphen (e.g. online, on-line, on line) or uppercase/lowercase have been omitted, and so have been variants differing only in case (e.g. AIDS, aids).
In sum, 50 Polish lexical chains were selected, all of them having translational equivalents in Czech. Among them there are 38 synonym chains, 10 variant chains and 2 mixed chains. The resulting 100 chains include 253 words, among them 67 Polish loans (including variant forms), 66 Czech loans, 53 Polish native synonyms, and 67 Czech native synonyms.
References
Słownik spolszczeń i zapożyczeń, M. Bańko, L. Drabik, L. Wiśniakowska. Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa, 2007.
Słownik wyrazów obcych PWN, ed. L. Wiśniakowska. Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa, 2004.