On lexical synonymy in romance languages

The article compares synonyms in romance languages (french, spanish, portuguese, italian, romanian). Synonymy as one of the linguistic universals is a manifestation of the linguistic sign asymmetry. In cognitive linguistics, synonyms are regarded as units of the same mental space. Synonymy represents the ability of linguistic units to replace one another in all or certain contexts without changing the content of the utterance, due to the identity or similarity of their meanings. Another important function of synonymy is the function of clarification which consists in identifying the properties and various features of the denoted objects and phenomena. Synonyms differ from their functional equivalents such as hyperonyms and euphemisms which are their functional and stylistic equivalents. In the romance languages in question, there are absolute and relative synonyms. Absolute synonyms are often found in scientific and technical terminology and in argot. They are different from variant words. Relative synonyms are divided into denotative and connotative (stylistic). In romance languages, the cognitive approach to synonymy shows family similarity in the presence of a prototype. Since the purpose of the article is to show how lexical synonymy is represented in the analyzed Romance languages ( their similarities and differences), the comparative method was used. The main result of this study is the identification of common synonym types for such romance languages as french, spanish, portuguese, italian and romanian. The author notes a greater closeness of the spanish and portuguese languages in terms of phonetic and orthographic similarities.