Near synonyms as co-extensive categories: 'High' and 'tall' revisited

One of the least understood semantic relations is synonymy. While perfect synonyms are rare, near synonyms are especially numerous. Near synonyms are words, which are similar in meaning, which tend not to be contrastive, but which are distributed differently. Following up an earlier study of the adjective tall, this paper examines the near synonyms high and tall, and argues that the words offer different construals of an entity's verticality. Drawing on work by MacLaury in the domain of colour, in particular, MacLaurys discovery of what he calls co-extensive colour categories and his explanation of coextension in terms of a dominant and a recessive vantage, it is proposed that the distribution of the English adjectives can be insightfully analyzed in terms of the co-extension relation, with high designating the dominant vantage, tall the recessive vantage.