y"> 1. There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, That it hardly becomes any of us To talk about the rest of us (Hock).
As for the same antonymic pair, they reveal nearly identical spheres of collocation. Examples: the adjective hot in its figurative meaning of angry and excited is chiefly combined with names of unpleasant emotions: anger, resentment, scorn, etc. Its antonym cold occurs with the same words.
The example with Elephant mentioned in the theoretical part, gives us an interesting notice such words as young - old; big - small; good - bad do not refer to independent absolute qualities but to some-implicit norm, they are relative.
The Elephant
When people call this beast to mind,
They marvel more and more
At such a little tail behind,
So large a trunk before.
The tail of an elephant is little only in comparison with his trunk and the rest of his body. For a mouse it would have been quite big. J. Lyons discusses an interesting example of antonyms also dealing with elephants: A small elephant is a large animal. The implicit size-norm for elephants is not the same as that for all animals in general: the elephant which is small in comparison with other elephants may be big in comparison with animals as a class.
Almost every word can have one or more synonyms. Comparatively few have antonyms. This type of opposition is especially characteristic of qualitative adjectives. E. g. in W. Shakespeare's Sonnet LXXVI" :
For as the sun is daily new and old, So is my love still telling what is told.
It is also manifest in words derived from qualitative adjectives, e. g. gladly - sadly; gladness - sadness. Irrespective of the part of speech, they are mostly words connected with feelings or state: triumph - disaster; hope - despair. Antonymic pairs, also irrespective of part of speech, concern direction (hither and thither) (LA Novikov calls these vectorial antonyms" ), and position in space and time (far and near).
Nothing so difficult as a beginning,
In poetry, unless perhaps the end (Byron).
There are also day - night, late - early, over - under.
2.1.1 Root Antonyms in language
As we said in the first part, antonyms and conversives reflect polarity. We «ll try to show that using antonyms. We »ve used
So, all antonyms can be divided into two big groups: root antonyms and derivational. First let us found a group of root antonyms. These are words, roots of which have opposite meanings.
· New - old
The new town of Whitney Clay had swallowed up the old village.
New - not existing before; introduced, made, invented, etc. recently or for the first time. Old - having been in existence or use for a long time.
· We can see that these pairs of words are pairs of antonyms, whereas the particle not is an element of formation of antonyms. We can find it using chain of meanings if the words. Distant - near
It may be near, it may...
