homosemy

A situation is a specific state of affairs perceived by a Speaker independently of how he wants to communicate it. For example, if a Speaker perceives the following situation: ‘Mary causes the flat part of her hand to come violently into contact with Peter's face’, he can express this situation by saying Mary slapped Peter in the face. For the same situation, another Speaker might say Peter was slapped in the face by Mary, It was in the face that Mary slapped Peter, etc.—depending on how he wants to express this situation. For all these different sentences the situation expressed remains the same. The meaning that corresponds to a situation will be called situational meaning (see also Mel’čuk et al., 1992:11). Two sentences with the same situational meaning will be called homosemous, or said to be linked by a relation of homosemy. The term ‘homosemous’ is proposed instead of the term ‘synonymous’, which we consider distinct from the former. X is synonymous to Y means ‘X is homosemous to Y and X has the same Semantic-Communicative Structure as Y’. Let us now compare sentences (1a) and (1b): (1) a. Peter killed the cat by strangling it. b. The cat died because Peter strangled it.

1997, Jean St-Germain, “Semantic Communicative Structure of Verbal vs. Conjunctive Causative Expressions (TO KILL/TO CAUSE TO DIE vs. TO DIE BECAUSE P)”, in Leo Wanner, editor, Recent Trends in Meaning Text Theory (Studies in Language companion series), volume 39, John Benjamins Publishing Company, →ISBN, page 76