Distinguishing synonymous adjectives – Calm, Peaceful, Silent, and Quiet

Abstract

Synonyms are regarded as important elements to enhance students’ lexical ability. In the present study, specific synonymous adjectives—calm, peaceful, silent, and quiet—were explored by using corpus-based analysis and componential analysis. The results suggest that these four synonymous adjectives are near-synonyms since they cannot be used interchangeably in all contexts.
In terms of formality, silent and peaceful are quite formal, while calm is quite informal. However, the adjective quiet can be both formal and informal. Semantic preference and semantic prosody also yield differences in the collocates used with the four adjectives. In the componential analysis, there are some shared components and individual components for the meanings of the four adjectives, which signify the characteristics of near-synonyms. The semantic components that can be shared with all four adjectives are health,
body condition, sound or voice, strangeness, and movement. The semantic components that can be shared the least are entertainment, relationships, changes, food and beverages, pride, number or population, money or currency, and humans.