The culture of speech implies the ability to correctly and accurately convey your thoughts. This is the ability to find the clearest and most suitable means of expression. And the choice of a word directly depends on its meaning. Understanding the meaning of words ensures that the thought will be expressed correctly, accurately and will be understood by the listener. But very often you can fall into such a trap as “consonant words”. What does it mean?
What are consonant words? The answer is simple. This is a phenomenon that occurs very often in speech and in our daily lives. After all, at least once everyone had to ask again without hearing a word. Addressee or addressee? Inhale or sigh? Sunrise or shoot? And if you pronounce these words quickly (after all, in informal communication very often they speak quickly and do not pronounce sounds very clearly), then it is completely difficult to distinguish them. And because of their similarity, it can be mistakenly decided that such words have the same meaning. So what are consonant words? Their scientific name is “paronyms”.
Definition
According to the definition presented in Ozhegov’s explanatory dictionary, “consonant” is “having a correspondence, close similarity”. From this definition, the concept of “paronym” flows smoothly.
Paronyms are words that are similar in sound but differ in their lexical meaning.
This similarity in sound often leads to the fact that one word is mistakenly used instead of another. This may be evidence of the speaker's incompetence or his not-so-accurate knowledge of terminology. A distinctive feature of paronyms is that they are not interchangeable. The difference in the meaning of paronyms is usually so significant that it is impossible to replace one word with another without breaking the meaning. You cannot use one word from a paronymic pair instead of another. This leads to a substitution of concepts, and the text loses all its meaning.
Our language is rich, therefore, there are quite a lot of consonant words in Russian. So, in the dictionary of O. V. Vishnyakov there are about 1000 paronymic pairs, and the meaning of each word and cases of its use are explained. Therefore, those who are interested in examples to understand what are consonant words, and to find out complex cases of the use of words, it will be useful to additionally refer to the reference literature.
Classification of paronyms by word formation method
Separating paronyms according to the method of education, we must first mention the different prefixes. These are words with one root, which have similar prefixes in sound (in other words, the prefix is called the prefix). And it is precisely due to different prefixes that words acquire different meanings. Example: provide - submit.
Suffix paronyms are consonant words formed by suffixes. This is one of the largest groups, which consists mainly of adjectives. Example: inventive - inventive.
And finally, root paronyms are the group with the least number of paronymic pairs, consisting mainly of nouns. Words from this group have different, but similar in sound roots. Example: resurrect - resurrect.
Types of Lexical Paronyms
By type, paronyms are divided as follows:
- Complete paronyms. These are words with the same root, with stress falling on the same syllables. It applies to the same logical-grammatical series, however, they have different meanings.
- Incomplete paronyms. These are words with the same root, which have different, but very close meanings. Example: ironic - ironic.
- Partial Paronyms. These are root words with an emphasis falling on different syllables, but which have a common conceptual and logical correlation. Example: rain - rainy.
Having dealt with the classification, you can better understand what are consonant words, and try to avoid lexical errors associated with their use in speech.