In poetry, unless perhaps the end (Byron).

Compare also day : : night; late : : early; over : : under.

The number of examples could be augmented, but those already quoted will suffice to illustrate both the linguistic essence of antonyms and the very prominent part they play among the expressive means a language can possess. Like synonyms they occupy an important place in the phraseological fund of the language: backwards and forwards, far and near, from first to last, in black and white, play fast and loose, etc.

Not only words, but set expressions as well, can be grouped into antonymic pairs. The phrase by accident can be contrasted to the phrase on purpose. Cf. up to par and below par. Par represents the full nominal value of a company’s shares, hence up to par metaphorically means ‘up to the level of one’s normal health’ and below par ‘unwell’.

Antonyms form mostly pairs, not groups like synonyms: above : : below; absent : : present; absence : : presence; alike : : different; asleep : : awake; back : : forth; bad : : good; big : : little, etc. Cases when there are three or more words are reducible to a binary opposition, so that hot is contrasted to cold and warm to cool.

Polysemantic words may have antonyms in some of their meanings and none in the others. When criticism means ‘blame’ or ‘censure’ its antonym is praise, when it means ‘writing critical essays dealing with the works of some author’, it can have no antonym. The fact lies at the basis of W.S. Maugham’s pun: People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise. Also in different meanings a word may have different aa-tonyms. Compare for example: a short story : : a long story but a short man : : a tall man; be short with somebody : : be civil with somebody.

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Semantic polarity presupposes the presence of some common semantic components in the denotational meaning. Thus, while ashamed means ‘feeling unhappy or troubled because one has done something wrong or foolish’, its antonym proud also deals with feeling but the feeling of happiness and assurance which also has its ground in moral values.

A synonymic set of words is an opposition of a different kind: its basis is sameness or approximate sameness of denotative meaning, the distinctive features can be stylistic, emotional, distributional or depending on valency.

There is one further type of semantic opposition we have to consider. The relation to which the name of conversives is usually given may be exemplified by such pairs as buy : : sell; give : : receive; ancestor : : descendant; parent : : child; left : : right; cause : : suffer; saddening : : saddened.

Conversives (or relational opposites) as F.R. Palmer calls them denote one and the same referent or situation as viewed from different points of view, with a reversal of the order of participants and their roles. The interchangeability and contextual behaviour are specific. The relation is closely connected with grammar, namely with grammatical contrast of active and passive. The substitution of a conversive does not change the meaning of a sentence if it is combined with appropriate regular morphological and syntactical changes and selection of appropriate prepositions: He gave her flowers. She received flowers from him. = She was given flowers by him.

Some linguists class conversives as a subset of antonyms, others suggest that antonyms and conversives together constitute the class of contrastives. Although there is parallelism between the two relations, it seems more logical to stress that they must be distinguished, even if the difference is not always clear-cut. The same pair of words, e. g. fathers and sons, may be functioning as antonyms or as conversives.

An important point setting them apart is that conversive relations are possible within the semantic structure of one and the same word. M.V. Nikitin mentions such verbs as wear, sell, tire, smell, etc. and such adjectives as glad, sad, dubious, lucky and others.

It should be noted that sell in this case is not only the conversive of buy, it means ‘be sold’, ‘find buyers’ (The book sells well). The same contrast of active and passive sense is observed in adjectives: sad ‘saddening’ and ‘saddened’, dubious and doubtful mean ‘feeling doubt and inspiring doubt’.

This peculiarity of conversives becomes prominent if we compare equivalents in various languages. The English verb marry renders both conversive meanings, it holds good for both participants: Mary married Dick or Dick married Mary. In a number of languages, including Russian, there are, as J. Lyons and some other authors have pointed out, two verbs: one for the woman and another for the man.

The methodological significance of the antonymic, synonymic, conversive, hyponymic and other semantic relations between lexical items becomes clear if we remember that the place that each unit occupies in the lexical system and its function is derived from the relations it contracts with other units (see table on p. 183).

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Chapter 11 LEXICAL SYSTEMS