Synonyms extraction is a difficult task to achieve and evaluate. Some studies have tried to exploit general dictionaries for that purpose, seeing them as graphs where words are related by the definition they appear in, in a complex network of an arguably semantic nature. The advantage of using a general dictionary lies in the coverage, and the availability of such resources, in general and also in specialised domains. We present here a method exploiting such a graph structure to compute a distance between words. This distance is used to isolate candidate synonyms for a given word. We present an evaluation of the relevance of the candidates on a sample of the lexicon.

If work in psychology has clearly brought to light that`conceptual exibility' exists in the categorization of objects, which led to re-questioning the traditional conception of categorization which considers rigid and discontinuous categories, it is not the case in linguistics and psycholinguistics. We propose, through highlighting the role of analogy in the categorization of verbs, to defend the idea of semantic¯exibility which constitutes a linguistic counterpart to psychologists' advances on categorization. Accordingly, it is shown that the production of`metaphoric' verbal utterances by adults and more particularly by 2/3-year-old children re¯ects analogical categorization of verbs which makes it possible to argue in favour of a computationa l model of the role of analogy in the semantic network of the verb lexicon.