И. В. Арнольд лексикология современного английского языка Издание

§ 10.9 ANTONYMS AND CONVERSIVES

Antonyms may be defined as two or more words of the same language belonging to the same part of speech and to the same semantic field, identical in style and nearly identical in distribution, associated and often used together so that their denotative meanings render contradictory or contrary notions.

Contradictory notions are mutually opposed and denying one another, e. g. alive means ‘not dead’ and impatient means ‘not patient’. Contrary notions are also mutually opposed but they are gradable, e. g. old and young are the most distant elements of a series like: old : : middle-aged : : young, while hot and cold form a series with the intermediate cool and warm, which, as F.R. Palmer points out, form a pair of antonyms themselves. The distinction between the two types is not absolute, as one can say that one is more dead than alive, and thus make these adjectives gradable.

Another classification of antonyms is based on a morphological approach: root words form absolute antonyms (right : : wrong), the presence of negative affixes creates derivational antonyms (happy : : unhappy).

The juxtaposition of antonyms in a literary text emphasises some contrast and creates emotional tension as in the following lines from “Romeo and Juliet” (Act I, Scene V):

My only love sprang from my only hate\ Too early seen unknown, and known too late!

One of the features enhancing the pathetic expressiveness of these lines is contrast based on such pairs as love : : hate; early : : late; unknown : : known. The opposition is obvious: each component of these pairs means the opposite of the other. The pairs may be termed antonymic pairs.

Antonyms have traditionally been defined as words of opposite meaning. This definition, however, is not sufficiently accurate, as it only shifts the problem to the question of what words may be regarded as words of opposite meaning, so we shall keep to the definition given at the beginning of the present paragraph.

14 И. В. Арнольд 209

The important question of criteria received a new and rigorously linguistic treatment in V.N. Komissarov’s work. Keeping to the time-honoured classification of antonyms into absolute or root antonyms (love : : hate) and derivational antonyms, V.N. Komissarov breaks new ground by his contextual treatment of the problem. Two words, according to him, shall be considered antonymous if they are regularly contrasted in actual speech, that is if the contrast in their meanings is proved by definite types of contextual co-occurrence.

Absolute antonyms, then, are words regularly contrasted as homogenous sentence members connected by copulative, disjunctive or adversative conjunctions, or identically used in parallel constructions, in certain typical contexts.

In the examples given below we shall denote the first of the antonyms — A, the second — B, and the words they serve to qualify — X and Y, respectively.

1. If you’ve obeyed all the rules good and bad, and you still come out at the dirty end ... then I say the rules are no good (M. Wilson).

The formula is:

A and (or) В = all

not A but (on the contrary) В

2. He was alive, not dead (Shaw). The formula is:

3. You will see if you were right or wrong (Cronin).

The formula is:

A or В

4. The whole was big, oneself was little (Galsworthy). The formula is: X is A, and Y, on the contrary, В

A regular and frequent co-occurrence in such contexts is the most important characteristic feature of antonyms. Another important criterion suggested by V.N. Komissarov is the possibility of substitution and identical lexical valency. This possibility of identical contexts is very clearly seen in the following lines: