When the same thing is said in different ways: Synonymy and alternations

In this paper, we revisit the concept of synonymy in order to test the hypothesis put forward by Pinker (2008), according to which two syntactic alternations should not have the same meaning. We describe syntactic alternations such as pintar a parede/pintar na parede, pegar o livro/pegar no livro and tocar o vidro/tocar no vidro, in order to verify if the holism effect is truly linked to the transitive construction. The conclusion is that Pinker' s hypothesis is not validated by the Portuguese sentences. Finally, we argue that a contextual theory is more suitable to explain the data described, and that grammatical construction and lexical choice are the two factors defining synonymy, being both factors filtered out by context.