In fact, synonyms usually do not co-occur, but they share a large number of significant co-occurrences -an observation that leads to the operationalization of the distributional hypothesis (Miller and Charles, 1991).
when two such concepts are mentioned together frequently since they belong to the same topic, this leads to box motifs, as the following examples from the English real language network illustrate: we observe different kinds of word pairs for the same concept: synonyms like (award, price), same word stem within or across word classes like (winning, won) or (Greek, Greece), and artifacts of punctuation or spelling (ancient, Ancient) or (interview, "), box motifs capture a very loose notion of synonymy: "interview" and the double quote " e.g.