Stress – See Word stress

Style, functional – See Functional style; Register

Stylistic connotation – when associations triggering connotational semantics of the word concern the situation in which the word is uttered, the social circumstances (formal, familiar, etc.), the social relationships between the interlocutors (polite, rough), the type and purpose of communication (learned, poetic, official, etc.), the word acquires stylistic connotations. – See Connotation

Stylistic semasiology – analysis of semantics in stylistic purposes; use of semantic capacities of a word in stylistic purposes.

Substantivization (substantivation) – creation of nouns from other parts of speech by means of conversion. E.g. a native, the invisible, too many ifs.

• partial s. – when a substantivized unit functions as a full-fledged noun, acquiring all its morphological categories (e.g. patient);

• complete/full s. – when a substantivized unit does not function as a full-fledged noun, because it does not acquire its morphological categories (the rich, the unthinkable).

Suffix – a post-root morpheme. – See Affix, Morpheme. Typology of ss.:

• productive vs. non-productive;

• grammatical (inflexional) vs. lexical (derivational);

• quasi-grammatical;

• polyfunctional.

Suppletion, lexical – a phenomenon when a stylistically neutral noun of native origin is correlated with a borrowed relative adjective: e.g. home – domestic; son – filial; sun – solar. The semantic relationship between them is quite regular. All these adjectives can characterize something through their relation to the object named by the noun. There exist also adjectives of the same root produced by derivation, but they are qualitative adjectives; besides, only some of them (fatherly, peaceful) show the regular semantic pattern, others (homely) show irregular semantic derivation.

Syllable – a unit of pronunciation uttered without interruption, forming the whole or a part of a word and usu. having one vowel sound often with a consonant or consonants before or after: there are two syllables in water and three in inferno.

Symbol – a) a linguistic element of the semantic triangle, representing the relationship between names and things; s. is a lexical item, a word as a combination of sounds and morphemes, a grammatical word-form, a word-combination, a sentence, an utterance, a text, etc.; b) a type of sign (q.v.).

Syncategorematic word – a functionally dependent (non-notional) word (a preposition, conjunction) as opposed to a functionally independent (notional) word (noun, verb, adjective).

Synchrony – a conventional isolation of a certain stage in the development of language as the object of linguistic investigation.

Synchronic – representing one conventional historical stage in the development of language.

Synecdoche – a figure of speech (metonymy type) in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa (e.g. new faces at the meeting; England lost by six wickets). – See Figurative language

Synonymic assimilation/condensation – parallel development of synonyms. E.g. pejorative meanings acquired by the nouns wench, knave, churl which originally meant 'girl', 'boy', 'labourer' respectively. This loss of 'old dignity' became linguistically possible, because there were so many synonymous terms at hand.

Synonymic dissimilation/differentiation – the diachronic process of synonymic rivalry, when some elements of a synonymic set become obsolete and drop out of use and others survive with a meaning more or less removed from the original one. Opp. to synonymic assimilation (q.v.).

Synonymic dominant – the most general term of its kind potentially containing the specific features rendered by all the other members of the group. Not to be confused with hypernym (a generic term), which is relative and serves as the name for the notion of the genus as distinguished from the names of species – hyponyms (q.v.).

Synonymy – the coincidence in the essential meanings of linguistic elements which (at the same time) usually preserve their differences in connotations and stylistic characteristics.

Synonyms – two or more words belonging to the same part of speech and possessing one or more identical or nearly identical denotational meanings, interchangeable in some contexts. Their distinctive features can be connotations, stylistic features, distributional or valency-dependent. The difference between some synonyms can be marked for register subject-field, mode, and style (tenor) or their combinations. Typology of ss.:

• cognitive synonyms – s. which differ in respect of the varieties of discourse in which they appear; the distinction between such items lies not so much in their inner lexical meaning, but in the sphere of their actual application or usage, as besides the referential basis (referential meaning – q.v.) the actual meanings of the words as found in utterances reflect relations which hold between lexical items within the communicative space, i.e. the functional differentiation of discourse.

• contextual/context-dependent ss. – similar in meaning only under some specific distributional conditions, when the difference between the meanings of two words is contextually neutralized: e.g. buy and get;

• dialectal ss. – pertaining to different variant of language from dialectal stratification point of view;

• functional ss. – the term is not lexicological proper as it refers to different syntactic units capable of performing one and the same syntactic function (e.g. Subordinate Object Clause and Complex Object constructions are functional synonyms);

• ideographic ss. – ss., which differ in shades of meaning, between which semantic difference is statable;

• stylistic ss. – are distinguished stylistically, i.e. in all kinds of emotional, expressive and evaluative overtones without explicitly displaying semantic difference;

• referential ss. – a vague term, concerns coreferential expressions, when one denotatum can be defined differently from different points of view and in different aspects: e.g. names Walter Scott and the author of 'Ivanhoe' are coreferential because they refer to one and the same denotatum – Sir Walter Scott;

• terminological ss. – two existing terms for one denotatum: e.g. borrowing and loan-word; concept and notion (the difference between them is not discriminated by some linguists); can be considered as variants;

• total (absolute) ss.- can replace each other in any given context, without the slightest alteration in denotative or emotional meaning and connotations (e.g. noun and substantive – are etymological variants; functional affix, flection and inflection – are morphological variants); total synonymy is a rare occasion. – See Variation

Syntactic formula – a non-idiomatic sequence of words which structurally resembles a set expression; a cliché, a stereotyped expression mechanically reproduced in speech. – See Polyword

Syntagmatics – linear (simultaneous) relationship of words in speech as distinct from associative (non-simultaneous) relationship of words in language. – See Paradigmatics.

System, lexical or vocabulary – lexical system of a language understood not purely as a sum total of all lexical elements in the vocabulary but rather as a set of elements interrelated in various ways and functioning together according to certain laws. It is a coherent homogeneous whole, constituted by independent elements of the same order linked and ordered in certain specific way.

• adaptive s.– capable of adapting itself to current needs of communication.

Systemic relationships in lexis – semantic and non-semantic relations of different order between units of the lexicon: hierarchical taxonomies, antonymic /synonymic groups, lexico-semantic fields/groups, holonyms, meronyms, epidygmatic relationships (q.v.) and the like, which make the system well suited for purposes of communication (speech production + speech perception). – See Non-semantic grouping

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