3. Antonyms. Types of antonyms.

Antonyms are defined as words of the same category of parts of speech which have contrasting meaning, e.g. hot – cold, light – dark, up-down, happiness – sorrow.

Antonyms fall into two main groups:

1. Root or absolute antonyms (those which are of different roots). These are words regularly contrasted as homogeneous sentence members connected by copulative, disjunctive conjunctions, or identically used in parallel constructions, in certain typical configurations (typical context). e.g. He was alive – not dead (Shaw) You will see if you were right or wrong

2. Derivational antonyms (affixal). The affixes in them serve to deny the quality stated in the stem. The contrast is implied in the morphological structure of the word itself. e.g. appear – disappear, happiness – unhappiness, logical – illogical, pleasant – unpeasant.

There are typical affixes and typical patterns that take part in forming theses derivational antonyms. The examples of given below prefixes prevail. They have negative meaning (dis-, il-/im-/in-/ir-, un-).

As to the suffixes it should be noted that modern English gives no examples of words forming their antonyms by adding a negative suffix, e.g. the suffix –less (hopeless::hopefull, useless::useful).

In most cases when the language posesses words with the suffix –less, the antonymic pairs found in actual speech are formed with the prefix un-. Thus, the antonimic opposition is not selfish::selfless but selfish::unselfish

The difference between absolute and derivational antonyms is not only morphological but semantic as well. Thus, according to the relationship between the notions expressed, antonyms may be characterized as contradictory (derivational antonyms) or contrary (absolute antonyms). A pair of derivational antonyms form a binary opposition, where the absolute antonyms are polar members of a gradual opposition,

e.g. young – old; beautiful:: pretty:: good-looking:: plain – ugly

Many antonyms are explained by means of the negative particle,

e.g. clean - not dirty; shallow – not deep

Not only words, but set expressions as well, can be grouped into antonimic pairs,

e.g. by accident – on purpose, up to par – below par

It is important to remember that antonyms form mostly pairs, not groups like synonyms,

e.g. above – bolow, absent – present, alike – different

Polisemantic words may have antonyms in some of their meanings and none in others. When criticism means ‘censure’ its antonym is praise; when it means ‘writing critical essays dealing with the works of some author’, it can have no antonym.

3. Polysemy

Polysemy (from the Greek πολυσημεία = multiple meaning) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a word, phrase, etc...) or signs to have multiple meanings. A polyseme is a word or phrase with multiple, related meanings. Different meanings of polysemes are actualised in different contexts. In the classical linguistic tradition a word is regarded as polysemous if more than a single definition is needed to account for its meaning

Regular polysemy is governed by certain linguistic processes, which are productive, rule-governed, and predictable. Here are some of them:

• Metonymic extension, responsible for creating senses such as foot in the foot of the mountain.

• The extension from a feeling (sad as in ‗the person is sad‘) to something evoking this feeling (as in ‗a sad day‘).

• Container vs quantity: the systematic relation between words denoting vessels and the quantity that the vessel holds, such as spoon, the utensil and spoon meaning ‗spoonful‘, as in a spoon of sugar.

• Container vs content: nouns like book alternate between the physical object and its content. In fact, as Cruse points out, both meanings can be active simultaneously, as in I'm going to buy John a book for his birthday (Cruse, 1986).

• Action vs result: nominals that describe an action, such as construction, cooperation, separation, often describe its result too.

• Place vs administrative unit vs people: nouns like city, country,state alternate their meaning between an administrative entity or unit, the group of people living within the unit's borders and the people who govern it.

• Plant vs material or food stuff: oak the tree (as in oak grove) and oak the wood (as in oak table), cotton the plant (as in cotton field) and cotton the material (as in cotton jeans), rice the plant (as in rice fields) and rice the food stuff (as in rice porridge).

• Syntactic alternations as in: 1) Bees swarm in the garden. 2) The garden swarms with bees. The two syntactic forms – one with an agent subject; the other with a locative subject – exhibit a variety of differences in the semantic structure of the verb.

One more prototypical kind of relationships between polysemes is the one where a certain condition included in the meaning is more privileged, or basic, than the others. Long, for example, is more prototypically used in the spatial sense; and only by extension in the duration sense.

Another group of verbs have conflated with one of their complement meanings. For example, consider the sentences: 1) The fish smells good. 2) The fish smells. In the second sentence, the sense of the verb smells has been conflated with that of a particular concept, bad. So, the meanings of the verb to smell are: 1) emit an odour, as in ‗The soup smells good‘; 2) smell bad, as in ‗He rarely washes, and he smells‘ 3) reek, stink. Fellbaum represents this kind of polysemy as superordinate and subordinate senses, where the subordinate sense has a more specific meaning which includes the adjectival element (Fellbaum, 1990).