Antonyms in English

Traditionally, antonyms are defined as pairs of words that have opposite or contrasting meanings, such as hot – cold, wide – narrow, happiness – sorrow, love – hate. This definition, however, is not sufficiently accurate. A more precise definition, taking into account all the various aspects of the phenomenon, runs as follows: Antonyms are 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 mentioned here are mutually opposed and mutually exclusive, as alive is the opposition of dead. Contrary notions, on the other hand, imply a gradation of meaning, so old and young, hot and cold are but the most distant elements in a series of intermediate stages like elderly, middle-aged; cool, lukewarm, etc. Onthe other hand, even an absolute opposition could be made gradable for stylistic purposes (e.g. more dead than alive).

Another classification of antonyms is based on a morphological approach, dividing them into absolute antonyms which are completely different in their sound-form (right – wrong, kind – cruel), and derivational antonyms with phonemically identical root-morphemes, distinguished by presence or absence of a negative affix (happy – unhappy, kind – unkind).

Antonyms are widely used as an expressive means in literature and colloquial speech. Their juxtaposition in contrastive pairs serves to express or emphasize emotional tension.

Antonymy in general shares many features typical of synonymy. Like synonyms, perfect antonyms are rare, and both are often restricted to certain contexts: thus thick is only one of the possible antonyms of thin, used when describing objects (e.g. a thin/thick slice of bread); when applied to persons, its antonym is fat. Thus we could speak of contextual antonyms.

Unlike synonyms, antonyms do not differ either in style, emotional colouring or distribution. Antonymic pairs are interchangeable – at least in some contexts. This is especially obviousif a pair of antonyms is used side by side: I know as much, or as little, as you. In other cases, the whole sentence receives an opposite meaning if a word is replaced by an antonym: This is very wise – This is very foolish.

In dealing with antonymic oppositions, it may be helpful to regard antonyms in terms of marked and unmarked members. unmarked member of the opposition usually has a more abstract or generalized denotational meaning which nay include referents of the marked member. In the antonymic pair old – young the unmarked member seems to be old, as it is possible to ask How old is the baby? without implying that the baby is old. In the pair narrow – wide, wide seems to be unmarked, in big – small it is big, etc. Semantic analysis of these adjectives shows that old, big, long, wide and others possess a more generalized semantic meaning than their antonyms. The corresponding semantic element may be described as ‘presence’ and comes to the fore when the adjectives used to denote the exact size, age, etc.: three months old (not three months young), twenty metres long (not twenty metres short), etc.

Antonymy is not evenly distributed among the categories of parts of speech. Most antonyms are adjectives, which is only since their qualitative characteristics could be easily contrasted: high – low, wide – narrow, strong – weak, friendly– hostile, etc. Verbs occupy the second place as far as antonymy is concerned: lose – find, open – close, weep – laugh, etc., followed by nouns: joy – grief, love – hatred, etc. Antonymic adverbs are either derived from adjectives: warmly – coldly, loudly – softly, etc., or imply time or space relations: now – then, here – there, ever – never, up – down, in – out.

Derivative antonyms are mostly restricted to definite patterns: appear – disappear, logical – illogical, prewar – postwar, useful – useless, where negative prefixes prevail: dis-, in- (with allomorphs), non- and un-, and suffixes are rare: -ful and - less are about the only contrastive pair of suffixes so used.

Antonyms should be distinguished from conversives which describe the same situation as seen from different points of view, and therefore not antagonistic but complementary in meaning: buy – sell, parent – child, left – right, etc., with an obvious place or role reversal. The substitution of one conversive by another does not change the meaning of a sentence if other necessary changes are made, and logico-grammatical relations are taken into account: He is my child – I an his paren t, He is to the left of me – I am to the right of him, I bought flowers – I was sold flowers.

Conversives are sometimes put into the same class with antonyms, or regarded as a subset of antonyms, or grouped together with antonyms under the name of contrastives. Although there is some parallelism between the two relations, it seems more logical to keep them apart. Unlike antonyms, several words display both the characteristics of a conversive pair, active and passive, as parts of the same semantic structure. Thus sad is both saddened and saddening, tire implies both tiring and tired, sell is active in I sell books and passive (more precisely mediopassive or middle voice) in The book sells well. In Russian, as in a number of other languages, there are two conversive verbs for the action of marrying – one for the woman and one for the man. The English verb, however, applies equally well to both participants.