Antonymy : sense relation with reference to Arabic texts

Abstract EN

Words have their own meanings when they are in isolation, however in every day talking meanings of words can be given in terms of their relationships with other words.

Words, according to Yule(1996: 118), cannot be only treated as' containers' or as fulfilling 'roles', they can have 'relationships'.

These relationships are called sense relations or lexical relations.

Characterizing the meaning of a word in terms of its relationship to other words has been treated as the analysis of lexical relations.

There are types of lexical relations or sense relations called by John Lyons (1977): synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, prototype, homonymy, polysemy, metonymy, and collocation.

This research deals with antonymy as a type of lexical relations.

The term 'antonym' is used in a sense equivalent to the term 'opposite'.

However, there is a difference between the two; antonymy refers to the relation of semantically opposite lexical items in a context while 'opposite' refers to the semantic relation between antonym pairs.

Antonyms are widely used in poetry, drama, novel, proverb, and speech to convey artistic effects.

Moreover, antonymy is specifically interesting because antonymous words share both syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations.