Anyone who has ever visited a more or less elegant restaurant knows that a table needs to be pre-booked. Otherwise, you can’t enjoy the dishes, all the places will be occupied. But what does "pre" mean? In which speech situations is it customary to use? The article defines what “preliminary” means, to which part of speech this language unit should be attributed. Synonyms of this word are given.
Part of speech
When determining the part of speech, it is very important to use the requested word in the sentence. This will help determine what syntactic role a particular language unit plays, what question can be asked about it:
- We (how?) Pre-bought tickets.
- My decision (what?) Is preliminary. I have not made a final choice.
From the sentences it is clear: there are two questions to the word tentatively. What does this situation mean? Obviously, a word can preliminarily play the role of two parts of speech: an adjective (the question is “what?”, Emphasis on an attribute of an object or a person): preliminary conclusion. And also adverbs (the question is “how?”, An indication of an action is indicated): pre-calculate.
The lexical meaning
When a part of the speech is defined, it is time to find out what the word “pre” means. There will be two interpretations, for an adverb and an adjective.
The lexical meaning for "preliminary" as an adverb is presented in the dictionary of Ushakov:
- in advance;
- ahead of time;
- early;
- before everything else.
It is easy to understand that the lexical interpretation of the word previously as an adjective is associated with the already presented interpretations for the dialect. It is worth noting that “preliminary” is an adjective of the middle gender, short form. The initial form is preliminary. Here is the lexical meaning of the word (from Ozhegov's dictionary):
- inconclusive;
- followed by something else.
Synonyms Selection
Now it’s clear what the word “pre” means. If this word appears several times in the text, it makes sense to replace it with a synonym.
“Preliminarily” can play the role of different parts of speech, therefore words with similar meanings will differ. For an adverb, you can pick up such synonyms: before, in advance, earlier, on time.
For the adjective, the following synonyms will be appropriate: former, rude, advance, temporary, inconclusive.
It should be noted that synonyms should fit as precisely as possible into the context of the sentence. For example, we can take the following sentence: "According to preliminary estimates, our candidate will win."
Here the word "coarse" will be appropriate (according to rough estimates), but the adjective "former" will not work. It’s worth choosing synonyms so that they accurately convey the information that the narrator wants to convey to the audience.