A Cognitive Perspective for Comprehending Paronyms

Paronyms as words, derived from the same root, are an intriguing linguistic issue. The purpose of this article is to present a cognitive approach to revealing the difference in their usage so that foreign language learners and teachers, as well as translators can have a practical guide to avoid errors in using paronyms. We investigate Russian paronyms дружеский, дружественный, дружный ‘friendly’ from the cognitive perspective. This involves analysis of deeply embedded conceptual structure which shows the evaluative meaning, profiled by paronyms and evaluated objective features, profiled by nouns which go with the given paronyms. We present an empirical analysis to suggest that these paronyms are not interchangeable. The results of the case study support the proposed approach and show that the comprehension of confusable paronyms can be achieved through understanding cognitive structures which underlie their meaning. The study of conceptual features of both paronyms and nouns, which go with them, offers sufficient ground for comprehending differences in their usage. Another implication is related to practical issues of translation and methods of illustrating the given paronyms to learners of Russian as a foreign language.