A Linguistic Study of Antonymy in
English Texts
Chunming Gao
School of Foreign Languages, Changchun University of Science and Technology, China
Qianzhen Zheng
School of Foreign Languages, Jilin University, Changchun, China
Abstract
—This paper aims to study antonymy in English texts. The significance of the study is presented first,
then the definition of antonymy and its classification are elaborated with examples. The focus of the paper is
the use of antonymy in specific English texts from linguistic perspective, in which abundant examples of
antonyms are quoted to help the illustration and prove that comprehending and investigating into antonymy
can help the understanding of different texts and the rising of literature flavor.
Index Terms
—
antonymy, antonyms, English text, linguistic study
I.
I
NTRODUCTION
In linguistics, one of the most important
fields is semantic relations, in particular, lexical relation,
which includes
synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, etc. Antonymy, oppositeness of meaning, has long been regarded as one of the most
important semantic relations. Human thinking and language are closely related, and the significance of antonymy in
human thinking is inevitably reflected in human language. Lyons (1968) says that human beings have a general tendency
to polarize experience and judgment—to think in opposites. And this would explain the existence of a large quantity of
antonyms in the vocabulary of human languages.
Antonymy is one of the semantic relations that are very useful. Antonym pairs are often used in texts
and in a large
number of proverbs and idioms to achieve rhetorical effects, for example, “a friend to everybody is a friend to nobody”,
no matter it is in common speech or in the literary writing. As a matter of fact, it is even one of the indispensable factors in
those figures of speech such as oxymoron, paradox, and irony. In addition, antonymy plays a remarkably significant role
in language teaching and learning, which can be shown in many definitions, for example, “tall” is defined as “not short”,
“trivial” is said to be “not important”. It is often the same case when lexicographers define a word. Just as Jackson (1988)
notes that, antonymy ranks the second (only next to synonymy), in terms of frequency,
among the various semantic
relations used in dictionary definitions.
II.
L
ITERATURE
R
EVIEW
A. The Definition of Antonymy
The word “antonymy” was coined by C. J. Smith as an opposite of “synonymy”. Since 1867, lots of efforts have been
taken to define “antonymy”, but the problem is that the definition of antonymy tends to illustration rather than description.
For example, if we would like to tell others what antonymy is,
to give some examples like
old/young, tall/short,
open/close, bad/good
, etc. will be more effective than to give a definition. However, finding a definition which could
account for every example of antonymy is difficult, even problematic.
Lyons (1977) defines “antonym” as the words which are opposite in meaning and “antonymy” as the oppositeness
between words. For example, “buy” and “sell” is a pair of antonyms and the relation between these two words is termed as
antonymy. Leech (1981) puts forward the definition of antonym and antonymy in
Semantics
that the opposite meaning
relation between the words is antonymy and word of opposite meaning is antonym. And a famous Chinese linguist Hu
Zhuanglin (2001, p.164) simply says “antonymy is the name for oppositeness relation”.
Traditional definitions of antonymy only concentrate on the oppositeness of meaning. Some traditional definitions are
as follows:
word of opposite meaning; (Leech, 1981)
word of opposite sense; (Pyles & Algeo, 1970)
words that are opposite. (Watson, 1976)
These definitions are only rough ideas and over ambiguous. First, they don’t explain the ways of oppositeness very
concretely. The antonym pairs like