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within a culture condition common associates, and therefore cultural specificity
in disgust triggers, and, perhaps surprisingly, relatively slower assimilation of the
resulting conventions.
12.2.6
Synonymy
While acknowledging that humans have a deep-seated urge to avoid synonymy
in natural language and create discriminations in use conditions where none
necessarily existed before, in order to avoid full truth-preserving and use-preserving
intersubstitutability of expressions, one might use the struggle to differentiate
senses as evidence of initial synonymy in language. People are not reliable in their
judgements of relative (im)politeness of various expressions available to modulate
the manner of presentation.
9
Thus, it is possible to find cases in which (
12.3
.
a
)is
not fully intersubstitutable with (
12.3
.
b
), and similarly for (
12.4
.
a
) and (
12.4
.
b
);
however, it will be difficult to obtain reliable judgements for either pair that one
is more (im)polite than the other. Where such expressions are not reliably ranked
in (im)politeness by the same individual on different occasions, then one has
an argument that relative to (im)politeness considerations they are synonymous
expressions.
(3) a.
May I move by, please.
b.
Excuse me, please.
(4) a.
You're in my way.
b.
Move.
That equivalence classes of (im)politeness are available, resulting in synonymy,
is compatible with the notion that gradedness is also available, and that some
expressions are reliably and robustly deemed more polite than others. Extremes
in the gradient are associated with taboo words. Interesting support for the notion
of a circle of gradience (see Sect.
12.2.3
) is in the fact that labels associated with
extremely positive and negative concepts are both subject to taboo.
12.2.7
Taboo Objects Have Exceptional Anaphoric Potential
Within the discussion of taboo topics, it has been noticed long ago that suppressed
objects of verbs of excretion are available as antecedents to anaphora, although
9
Similar facts obtain with respect to quantifying determiners in natural language (Moxey and
Sanford
1993
).
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