Ministry of the higher and secondary special education of the republic of uzbekistan state world languages university

 
1.3. The controversy between identity and similarity in synonymy 
The nature and essence of the relationships of synonyms is still causing 
hot debates. Therefore synonyms are being treated in different ambiguous ways 
by different linguists.
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Synonymy as a linguistic phenomenon has always raised heated 
discussions related to their semantic proximity and pragmatic relevance. These 
theoretical problems still need to find their solutions. The most controversial 
among those is the problem of criteria of synonymy. There are a great many 
definitions of the term, but so far there is no universally accepted one. 
(
www.major-theoretic
. narod.ru/lexicology/08-Synonymy.doc) 
It has been acceptable for many years to define synonyms as two or more 
words that have the same meaning. This definition has started to be considered 
as inaccurate and somewhat misleading. As I.V.Arnold points out, “…If two 
words exactly coincide in meaning and use, the natural tendency is for one of 
them to change its meaning or drop out of the language. Besides, words of the 
same meaning would be useless for communication: they would not enrich the 
language”.
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In other words, sameness of meaning contradicts the rule of
language economy, leaving us with the understanding of synonyms as words 
only somewhat similar but not identical in meaning.
Traditional linguistics suggested conceptual criterion and proclaimed 
synonyms as words belonging to the same category of parts of speech describing 
the same concept but varying either in shades of meaning or in stylistic 
characteristics. However, some aspects of this definition have been criticized. 
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Miller, G. Word-net: An Online Lexical Database, Int'l J. Lexicography, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1990.- pp. 235-312.
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Апресян Ю.Д., Лексическая семантика (синонимические средства языка) // Автореферат диссертации 
на соискание ученой степени доктора филологических наук. М., 1983. 37 с.
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Arnold I.V. The English Word. M., 1973.- p. 177 

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Since synonymy is a linguistic phenomenon, it must be defined with the help of 
linguistic terms. The term ‘concept’ makes the definition sound rather
extralinguistic.
R. Aldington in his book 
Death of a Hero 
picked out a group of 
synonyms masterly to describe the situation of soldiers - survivors after an 
unsuccessful battle: 
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“ … The Frontshires [name of battalion]
straggered
rather than
walked
down the bumpy trench … About fifty men, the flotsam of the wrecked 
battalion,
 stumbled
past them …. They 
shambled
heavily along, no keeping step 
or attempting to, bent wearily forward under the weight of their equipment, their 
unseeing eyes turned to the muddy ground.”
In this extract we can find three synonymic verbs expression movement. 
Thus, the verb 
to walk
is used with its three synonyms, each of which describes 
the process of walking in its own way. In contrast 
to walk
the other three words 
do not only carry the bare idea of going on foot but also three different manners 
of walking are attached to them. Let’s see the distinguishing meanings of each 
synonym separately. 
Stagger
means “to sway while walking” and, also, implies 
a considerable, sometimes painful, effort. 
Stumble
means “to walk tripping over 
uneven ground and nearly falling.” 
Shamble
implies dragging one’s feet while 
walking; a physical effort is also meant by the word.
With the help of synonyms the author created a vivid picture of the 
exhausted, broken men marching from the battle field and enhances the general 
atmosphere of defeat and hopeless. The reader of this extract can imagine the 
whole scenery in front of his eyes.
In conclusion, it is noteworthy that the skill to choose the most suitable 
word for every context and every situation is an essential part of language 
acquisition. Based on the examples provided above, we can state that 
synonyms are two or more words which share (in the broad sense) the same 
denotational meaning yet often contain different connotations.
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www.goodreads.com/book/show/143398 

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Many linguists used to stress that the English language is peculiarly rich 
in synonyms owing to Britons’, Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans’ fighting 
and settling upon the soil of the British Isles. “As a result, British scholars 
studied Greek and Latin and for centuries used Latin as a medium for 
communication on scholarly topics”
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Synonymy has its characteristic patterns in each language. Its peculiar 
feature in English is the contrast between relatively simple stylistically neutral 
words, literary words borrowed from French and learned words of Greco-Latin 
origin. “This results in a sort of stylistically conditioned triple “keyboard” that 
can be illustrated by the following :
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