Other types of paradigmatic relations

There are many cases of similarity between words easily confused with synonymy but in fact essentially different from it. The most important are lexical variants, paronyms, malapropism.

I.V. Arnold calls lexical variants examples of free variation in lan­guage because they are not conditioned by context but are optional with the individual speaker. E.g. northward/norward, whoever/ whosoever. Lexical variants are differ­ent from synonyms because they are similar in phonetical or spelling form and identical in meaning and distribution. Lexical variants should not be confused with paronyms, words that are similar (not identical) both in sound form and meani ng but different in meaning and usage. E.g. inge­nious and ingenuous ;. Inge­nious means ‘clever’ and may be used both of man and of his inventions and doings (an ingenious device, an ingenious craftsman); Ingenuous means ‘frank’, ‘artless’.

A special type of word confusion in English has received the name of malapropism (after Mrs Malaprop, a character in Sheridan’s comedy “The Rivals”). The name of this personage is in its turn derived from the French expression malapropos which is used about misapplied or out-pf-place words and expressions. A malapropism is a word misapplied through the habit of using learned and sonorous language without understanding it. Wishing to tell her niece that she should forget about her penniless suitor, Mrs. Malaprop recommends her to illiterate (no such verb exists and the adjective illiterate is a synonym for uneduca­ted) instead of to obliterate (meaning ‘to efface entirely’) the man from her memory.

Antonyms.

Antonyms may be defined as two or rarely more words of the same language belonging to the same part of speech, identical in style and nearly identical in distribution, associated and used together so that.their denotative meanings render contrary or contradictory notions. Antonyms form binary oppositions, the distinctive feature of which is semantic polarity. Such oppositions are called antonymic pairs. e.g. love - hate, early - late, unknown - known..

V. N. Komissarov worked out a classification of antonyms and criteria of antonymy applying a contextual treatment of the problem. He classified antonyms into absolute or root: love- hate, late - early and derivatiional antonyms known – unknown. He gave at least 2 criteria of antonymy. 1)two words shall be considered antonymous if they are regularly contrasted in actual speech. 2) the possibility of substitution and identical lexical valency.

Antonyms are classified into:1)a bsolute antonyms then are words regularly contrasted, as homogeneous sentence members connected by copulative (соединительный), disjunctive (разделительный) or adversative (противительный) conjunctions. E.g. He was alive, (not dead).

Members of the same antonymic pair reveal nearly identical spheres of collocation. The adjective hot in its figurative meaning of ‘angry’ and ‘excited’ is chiefly combined with unpleasant emotions: anger, resent­ment, scorn, etc. Its antonym cold occurs with the same words. Both hot and cold are used in combinations with emotionally neutral personal nouns: fellow, man, but not with personal nouns implying posi­tive evaluation: friend, supporter.

Unlike synonyms, antonyms do not differ either in style, emotional colouring or distribution. They are interchangeable at least in some con­texts.

2) derivational antonyms. The affixes in them serve to deny the quality stated in the stem, e.g. the opposition known - unknown. There are typical-affixes and typical patterns for derivational antonyms. The regular type of derivational antonyms con­tains negative prefixes: dis-, il-lim-lin-lir - and un -. The only suffix forming antonyms - less. But the opposition hopeless - hopeful or useless - useful is more complicated as the suffix – less is not merely added to the contrasting stem, but substituted for the suffix – ful.

Leonard Lipka and David Crystal classified antonyms into contradictories, contraries, incompatibles and conversives.

Contradictories are words that contradict each other and the denial of one thing implies the assertion of the other: e.g. dead-alive, single-married (not A but B). Contradictories are also called complementaries.

Contraries (antonyms proper) add to each other, e.g. cold – warm; big-small. (A and B= all). They are also called gradable, as they can form gradual oppositions: hot-warm-tepid-cold

Incompatibilities are characterized by relations of exclusion, e.g. red is not yellow, not blue etc. (A or B)..

C onversives, e.g. buy - sell, give - receive. Conversives denote one and the same referent as viewed from different points of view, that of the subject and that of the object. The substitution of a conversive does not change the meaning of a sentence if appropriate regular morpho­logical and syntactical changes take place, e.g. He gave her flowers — She received flowers from him.

Not only words, but phraseological units as well, can be grouped into antonymic pairs. The phrase by accident can be contrastedto the phrase on purpose.

Polysemantic words may have antonyms in some of their meanings and none in the others, e.g. criticism - blame; the antonym is praise; when the meaning is - writing critical essays, it can have no antonym. Also in different meanings a word may have different antonyms. E.g: a short story - a long story but a short man- a tall man, to be short with somebody- to be civil with somebody.

Some scholars considered the problem of antonymy to be extralinguistic, as antonyms deal mostly with logical associations and notions. A.I.Smirnitsky suggested excluding them from the scope of lexicology. But today linguists speak about special antonymic connotations,which are realized in the meanings of the words themselves. E.g. friend – also not an enemy.

LECTURE V.