On the issue of synonymic definitions acceptability in English monolingual lexicography

Abstract

The purpose of the present article was to examine the advantages and disadvantages of using synonymous words to define the meaning of a headword in English monolingual lexicography. The topicality of the study lies in the fact that, despite different opinions on the feasibility of this definition method, the latter has been widely used in English dictionaries for several centuries and is currently used. The authors proceeded from the Russian linguists’ point of view, treating synonyms not as equivalent words, but as lexical units belonging to the same thematic group and so similar in meaning that their correct use in speech is impossible without accurate knowledge of their distinctive(semantic, stylistic, contextual) features. Synonymic definition has been considered as a kind of the language metalinguistic function implementation. The authors of the article highlight one of the ways to implement the metalinguistic function – synonymous intra-linguistic translation.