Synonymy in Jordanian Arabic

This paper is devoted to the investigation of synonymy in Jordanian Arabic. It has been assumed that synonymy in Jordanian Arabic has partial rather than complete synonymy. This means that the abundance of Jordanian Arabic in synonyms can be attributed to a number of explanations, namely dialectical variations, the speaker’s attitude, and origin of words. The data for this study come from two main sources: written and spoken material. In accordance with the established literature on the semantics of synonymy, we have classified the corpus of the study on the basis of these parameters. The main findings reveal that total synonymy is hard to find in Jordanian Arabic, supporting the argument of many linguistic studies for the existence of partial rather than total synonymy in a language. Keywords: dialectical variations, evaluative meaning, origin of words, semantics, synonym