Different Approaches to Enantiosemy in English

Abstract

Our interest in this article is to investigate different approaches to enantiosemy in English. In the coverage of a variety of viewpoints introduced in the present article, reference is made to well-established traditional and most recent perspectives and approaches provided by both European and Russian scholars with the view of elucidating different principles of classification. The data for the analysis are extracted from different dictionaries and British National Corpus in order to find distinct motivated meanings between opposite senses in the semantic structure of enantiosemic words. The analysis of the data enables us to reveal some regularities of antonymic relations which make it possible to regard them as special cases of polysemy in English. For this reason we consider it crucial to disclose integral and differentiating semes, as well as different potential semes, which give rise to different associations.

Keywords

• enantiosemy
• homonymy
• polysemy
• integral semes
• differentiating semes
• hyperlexeme