Dilbilim Araştırmaları Dergisi (Jul 2009)
Contronymy and Equivalence: a Case Study on German ‘aufgeben’ (upgive)
Abstract
Contronymy, a phenomenon which has received much attention in recent years, is often described as sense opposition at the micro-level. By extending current theories on paradigmatic sense relations of exclusion and opposition, five different types of contronymy can be distinguished namely contronymy of incompatibility, of antonymy, of complementarity, of conversivity and of reversivity. This article provides a structural description of the German polysemous lexeme aufgeben and deals with potential equivalency problems. In order to demonstrate the semantic scope which the lexeme aufgeben covers, an attempt to produce a semantic analysis has been made. The article also demonstrates that the senses of aufgeben vary in the extent to which they represent the same concepts in English. These variations can be seen as forming a continuum in terms of the different degrees of equivalence, ranging from exact equivalence in meaning through inexact equivalence to non-equivalence.
