5. The notion of antonymy and oppositeness

The word «antonymy» derived from the Greek root anti- , which means «opposite». The term antonymy is often used to label oppositeness in meaning. In comparison to synonymy and hyponymy, antonymy is a binary relationship that characterizes a relation between only two words at a time [ 11, p.185].

Among lexical semantic relations, antonymy is unique in a way that it requires one-to-one relation, rather than one-to-many or many-to-many. For instance, if we are asked to name synonyms to the word «interesting», there is a number of answers; but if we are asked to name an antonym of «interesting», there is often a unique opposite presupposed. This peculiar binarity of antonymy means that «the best» examples of this kind of semantic relations are those which either belong to the semantic set that naturally has only two members or are the polar categories of something that can be described in terms of scalar dimension [17, p.1]. An example of two-member set may be male/female; the example of polar categories may be pairs of adjectives which describe scalar dimensions: short/tall; early/late etc.

Unlike synonymy, antonymy, which conveys the idea of oppositeness, is a less pervasive phenomenon in English vocabulary. That’s because it works rather differently from sysnonymy. For instance, you cannot ask what is the opposite of yellow, because it does not have an antonym. Yellow belongs to a series of colour words that are mutually exclusive, and thus it is yellow because it is not red, green, black etc. [13]

Nevertheless the idea of oppositeness is of high importance for the organization of not only language system in realization, but of our thinking as well. What is meant here is that we conceptualize by means of oppositions [23, p.199-200]. Yes, it has even been established that throughout our metalinguistic development antonymic relations are mastered earlier than synonymic relations. Murphy, an acknowledged investigator of antonymy, goes even so far as to call antonymy «the archetypical lexical semantic relation» [17, p.2]. The realization of the idea of oppositeness in language can be expressed in different ways and by different means - by structurally different words or words belonging to different word classes etc.

Some philologists consider antonymy to be a marker of descriptive lexical content of word lexical categories. For example, the verb increase has an antonym decrease, thus it has descriptive content. Meanwhile, the auxiliary verb do or the infinitive particle to have no antonyms and hence they are function words. However, it must be stated that not in all the cases we should rely on this principle: «if a word has no antonym, this does not necessarily mean it is not a content word» [6, p.31].

6. Defining antonymy

Throughout all the time of investigations taken into the semantic relation of antonymy there were a lot of attempts to define this phenomenon.

Steven Jones refers to antonymy as «the pair-wise relation of lexical items in context that are understood to be semantically opposite» (Jones 2002:17). He denotes oppositeness as the semantic relation between antonym pairs, and says that antonyms are understood to have meanings opposed to one another in a particular context [17, p.2]. According to this approach, antonymy is a phenomenon that is context-driven.

Murphy , who offered Relation-by-Contrast theory, antonymy is categorized as a binary realization of a more general relation of «lexical contrast» [17,9]. He has proposed that antonymic relations are those, which are based on a pragmatic principle of contrast by minimal difference. So in defining the notion of antonymy Murphy in a way stands closely to Jones, who also stresses attention on a context. From this point of view, any of the words can be accounted as antonyms, if used in an appropriate context [4, p.28].

Meanwhile Keith Alan differentiates overall between two ways in which antonyms are usually treated: 1) referring to contrast between predicates 2) referring to any lexical pairs that constitute certain oppositeness [ 4, p.26]. Supporting the last more general view, she defines antonymy as «a relation in which two words share all relevant properties except for one which causes them to be incompatible» (Alan 2009: 4).

Edward Finegan defined antonymy as a binary relationship between the words with complementary meanings, by which he assumes that A and B can be regarded as antonyms provided that when A describes a particular referent, B cannot describe it, and vice versa [11, p.185].

So as we can see different linguistic experts put emphasis on different properties and peculiarities of antonymy, and for that reason these definitions differ in some way. The problem of defining the notion of antonymy as well as the issues which contribute to this problem are represented in the following passage by Keith Alan:

«Attention to antonymy as an arguably syntagmatic relation with particular discource uses has brought into questions earlier definitions that rely on logical notions such as incompatibility and entailment. The broader use of the term antonym includes all types of opposite relations raises questions regarding how the relation as a whole can be defined: What counts as opposition? Is antonymic opposition a semantic or pragmatic issue? How can we account for the perception that some antonym pairs seem more «antonymous» than others?» (Alan 2009: 4).

But in general we may notice that some major aspects in defining antonymy are preserved in all the definitions. Among these agreed aspects are , firstly, that antonymy is a binary relation and , secondly, that it is a relation based on oppositeness. So as long as some issues are the matter of argue, such as whether antonymy is context-determined or not, perhaps by defining antonymy the best variant would be a somewhat simplistic definition, which may be formulated in this way: antonymy is a binary lexico-semantic relation between words based on oppositeness.