Heritage bilingualism is sustained or disrupted through everyday lexical choices that simultaneously carry semantic content and social meaning. This study examines how English size adjectives (e.g., big and its near-synonyms) function as a semantic–stylistic resource in heritage bilingual usage, and how such choices interact with identity positioning, belonging, and family-mediated language maintenance. Building on theoretical accounts of lexical semantics and synonymy, the analysis treats “size” not as a purely denotational category but as a culturally indexical domain in which register, affect, and stance become visible through word selection (Palmer, 1981; Soule & Smith, 1946; Taylor, 2017). The study integrates (a) corpus-guided semantic mapping using lexicographic sources and WordNet-informed synonym networks as a pedagogical and analytic scaffold (Phan, 2024; WordNet, n.d.; Wehmeier, 2015), and (b) interpretive analysis of bilingual family and youth experiences reported in contemporary bilingualism scholarship, emphasizing interactional context, family language policy, and community support as mediators of bilingual outcomes (Andrea et al., 2024; Beatty-Martínez et al., 2020; De Houwer & Bornstein, 2022; Jo et al., 2023). Findings show that heritage bilingual speakers’ lexical preferences for big synonyms cluster around three interrelated functions: (1) identity alignment through “safe” high-frequency vocabulary versus identity display through marked or regionally salient synonyms, (2) affective nuance and evaluative control in family and peer interaction, and (3) social integration strategies that minimize linguistic friction in majority-language spaces while preserving culturally meaningful expressions within heritage contexts (Kadir, 2021; Irving Torsh, 2020; Lundberg, 2020). The article argues that size adjective choice provides a micro-level indicator of macro-level heritage language dynamics, and proposes implications for heritage language pedagogy, digital preservation initiatives, and family/community support models (Hutson et al., 2024; Kubota & Bale, 2020).

Heritage bilingualism, lexical semantics, synonymy

Andrea, A. N., MacLeod, A. N., Trudeau, N., Lefebvre, P., Beauchamp, M. L. H., Schneider, P., Sutton, A., & Bérubé, D. (2024). How community and family support bilingual language development: Insights from bilingual Canadian families. International Journal of Multilingualism, 21, 439–463. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2022.2034830

Beatty-Martínez, A. L., Navarro-Torres, C. A., Dussias, P. E., Bajo, M. T., Guzzardo Tamargo, R. E., & Kroll, J. F. (2020). Interactional context mediates the consequences of bilingualism for language and cognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 46(6), 1022–1047. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000770

Bialystok, E. (2021). Bilingualism: Pathway to cognitive reserve. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(5), 355–364. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2021.02.003

Bialystok, E., & Craik, F. I. M. (2022). How does bilingualism modify cognitive function? Attention to the mechanism. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 29, 1246–1269. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02057-5

De Houwer, A., & Bornstein, M. H. (2022). Belgium: Bilingual and monolingual parenting in infancy. In M. H. Bornstein (Ed.), Parenting, infancy, culture (Chapter 4). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367824327

Gallo, F., & Abutalebi, J. (2023). The unique role of bilingualism among cognitive reserve-enhancing factors. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 27(2), 287–294. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728923000317

Grundy, J. G. (2020). The effects of bilingualism on executive functions: An updated quantitative analysis. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 4, 177–199. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-020-00062-5

Gunnerud, H. L., ten Braak, D., Reikerås, E. K. L., Donolato, E., & Melby-Lervåg, M. (2020). Is bilingualism related to a cognitive advantage in children? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 146(12), 1059–1083. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000301

Hutson, J., Ellsworth, P., & Ellsworth, M. (2024). Preserving linguistic diversity in the digital age: A scalable model for cultural heritage continuity. Journal of Contemporary Language Research, 3(1), 10–19. https://doi.org/10.58803/jclr.v3i1.96

Irving Torsh, H. (2020). Intermarriage, migration and language: What we know. In Linguistic intermarriage in Australia (pp. 17–44). Palgrave Pivot. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27512-9_2

Jo, A., Richardson, S., & de Jong, E. J. (2023). “I feel really special and proud that I am bilingual”: Exploring a second-generation Korean American bilingual adolescent’s emotions and sense of belonging through family language policy. International Journal of Bilingualism, 27(2), 199–216. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069221126272

Kadir, R. (2021). Language maintenance in an interracial marriage: The case of Indonesian females’ language choice in Canada. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 11(1), 146–156. https://doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v11i1.34589

Kubota, R., & Bale, J. (2020). Bilingualism—but not plurilingualism—promoted by immersion education in Canada. TESOL Quarterly, 54(3), 773–785.

López, B. G., Luque, A., & Piña-Watson, B. (2023). Context, intersectionality, and resilience: Moving toward a more holistic study of bilingualism in cognitive science. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 29(1), 24–33. https://doi.org/10.1037/cdp0000472

Lundberg, A. (2020). Viewpoints about educational language policies: Multilingualism in Sweden and Switzerland. Malmö University.

Palmer, F. R. (1981). Semantics. Cambridge University Press.

Palmer, F. R. (2001). Mood and modality. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139167178

Phan, T. T. M. (2024). Applying WordNet in teaching the lexical semantics of English nouns. VNUHCM Journal of Science and Technology Development, 27(SI), 64–72. https://doi.org/10.32508/stdj.v27iSI.4411

Semak, L. A. (2022). Lexical synonyms as a stylistic tool in modern Ukrainian women’s prose. Ukrainian Sense, 1, 75–84. https://doi.org/10.15421/462208

Siegel, M., Vakulenko, M., & Baum, J. (2023). Towards Ukrainian WordNet: Incorporation of an existing thesaurus in the domain of physics. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2023) (pp. 121–126). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Soule, R., & Smith, G. H. (1946). A dictionary of English synonyms & synonymous expressions: Designed as a guide to apt and varied diction. Tudor Publishing Company.

Taran, A. (2023). Corpus analysis of word semantics. In COLINS-2023: 7th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Systems (pp. 373–384). National Technical University “Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute.”

Taylor, J. R. (2017). Lexical semantics. In B. Dancygier (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of cognitive linguistics (pp. 246–261). Cambridge University Press.

Tkachenko, O. H., Sydorenko, O. P., Melnikova, I. O., Myronets, N. R., & Smus, A. H. (2021). The media image of Ukraine: A European view. Linguistics and Culture Review, 5(S4), 203–217. https://doi.org/10.21744/lingcure.v5nS4.1574

Wehmeier, S. (Ed.). (2015). Oxford advanced learner’s dictionary. Oxford University Press.

WordNet. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://wordnet.princeton.edu/