plesionymy

English

Etymology

plesionym +‎ -y

Noun

plesionymy (uncountable)

1. (linguistics) The state of being close but not identical in meaning, as with the words "overcast" and "cloudy".
   • 2000, Tony Bex, Michael Burke, Peter Stockwell, Contextualized Stylistics: In Honour of Peter Verdonk, →ISBN, page 26:

     The line between plesionymy and cognitive synonymy can be drawn with some precision. However, the limits of plesionymy in the opposite direction along the scale of synonymity are more difficult to specify; as the semantic distance between between lexical items increases, plesionymy shades imperceptibly into non-synonymy.

   • 2012, Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, Brian McHale, The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, →ISBN, page 58:

     Indeed an analysis in which the semantics of plesionymy (near but peculiar synonymy) can be traced through the text (see Stockwell 2000) serves only to increase the appreciation of the poetic mechanics of paranoia and disturbance in the text.

   • 2016, Peter Stockwell, The Language of Surrealism, →ISBN, page 79:

     Essentially, the repeated syntactic form motivates a cognitive search for plesionymy, and a reader is forced upwards on a granularity scale until a domain is found that is plausibly common to the two elements of the plesionym.