Antonymy
The traditional definition of antonyms as lexemes opposite in meaning sounds straightforward and needs clarification. To antonyms belong such pairs of lexemes as love / hate, early /late, unknown / known, etc. The word ‘opposite’ presupposes quite a variety of semantic contrasts: polarity, exclusion, negation of one concept by another, etc. Cf.: kind/cruel where the opposition expresses contradictory notions and kind/unkind where the opposition expresses negation, i.e. unkind means the same as not kind. Hence, antonyms are lexemes characterized by various kinds of contrasts in their denotational meaning. Antonymy refers to very important semantic relations which form a simple type of structure – contrastive multitude [Харитончик 1992: 105].
Different kinds of contrast make it possible to present a semantic classification of antonyms and point out the following types of antonyms:
1. Contradictory antonyms. Here belong such opposites as single/married, first/last, dead/alive, true / false, perfect / imperfect, etc. To use one lexeme of the pair is to contradict the other: to be alive is not to be dead; to be single is not to be married; to use not before one of them is to make it semantically equivalent to the other. The affirmation of one lexeme of the pair implies the negation of the other. When we state that John is single we imply that John is not married. D.Crystal calls such antonyms complementary [Crystal 1995:165]. The items complement each other in their meanings.
2. Contraries, which are also called gradable antonyms [Crystal 1995:165]. These are opposites, such as large/small, happy/sad, wet/dry, cold/hot, young/old, etc. These are items (adjectives) capable of comparison; they do not refer to absolute qualities. We can say that something is very wet or quite dry, or wetter or drier than something else. It is as if there is a scale of wetness/dryness, with wet at one end and dry at the other. Such antonyms presuppose a certain starting point or norm in regard to which a certain degree of quality is ascertained. Adjectives like big/small, old/young, allow different interpretation depending on what object is meant. Compare for instance a small elephant and a big mouse. Each object has its norm of size: the smallest elephant is bigger than the biggest mouse. The negation of a certain quality in case of contraries does not imply the opposite quality: ‘our town is not big’ does not mean ‘our town is small’.
Contraries unlike contradictories admit possibilities between them. This is observed in pairs like cold/hot where extreme opposite qualities are expressed. Intermediate members make up pairs cold/warm, hot/cool, warm/cool. Contraries may be opposed to each other by the absence or presence of one of the components of meaning like sex or age: man / woman, man / boy, boy / girl.
3. Incompatibles. Semantic relations of incompatibility exist among antonyms with the common component of meaning and may be described as relation of exclusion but not of contradiction. A set оf words with the common component ‘part of the day’: morning, evening, day, night, afternoon may constitute antonymous pairs based on exclusion: morning/evening, day/night, morning/night, etc. To say morning is to say not afternoon, not evening, not night. The negation of this set does not imply semantic equivalence with the other but excludes the possibility of the other words of this set. Relations of incompatibility are also observed between colour terms. Thus black/white exclude red, green, blue, etc.
4. Conversives or converse terms are antonyms denoting one and the same referent viewed from different points of view. This type of oppositeness, where one item presupposes the other, is called converseness. Here belong verbs buy/sell, give/receive, cause/suffer, win/lose; nouns: teacher/student, doctor/patient, husband/wife, parent/child. These antonyms are mutually dependent on each other. There cannot be a wife without a husband. We cannot buy something without something being sold. Close to conversives are antonyms denoting reverse actions: tie / untie, wind / unwind.
5.Vectorial are antonyms such as over/under, inside/outside, North/South, East/West which denote oppositeness of directions referring to spatial relations, actions. Here belong verbs like come/leave, arrive/depart and also those denoting relations of cause and effect: learn / know, know / forget.
It is obvious that not every lexeme has an antonym. A vast majority of lexemes in the language have no opposites at all. It does not make sense to ask ‘What is the opposite of rainbow? Or of chemistry? Or of sandwich?’ Most antonyms are adjectives which is only natural because qualitative characteristics are easily compared: old – new, strong – weak, easy – difficult, high – low, etc. Verbs take the second place, then come nouns and adverbs.
The other point to note is that we ought to differentiate between oppositeness of concepts and meanings. For instance, big and large are very similar in meaning, as are little and small, but the antonym of little is big, and of large is small. Large is not the antonym of little, even though they are conceptually opposed [Crystal 1995:165].
Antonyms are also differentiated as to their structure. The majority of antonyms are the so-called absolute antonyms which have different stems: love/hate, early/late, clever/stupid, etc. Others formed by adding derivational affixes to the stem are derivational (affixal) antonyms. The affixes in them serve to deny the quality stated in the stem: kind/unkind, moral/amoral, useful/useless.
One should bear in mind that in case of polysemantic antonyms as well as synonyms we cannot speak of antonymy of a lexeme as a whole, as different LSVs have different antonyms: thin 1/thick, (a thin/thick slice of bread), thin 2/fat (a thin/fat man).