Antonymy Essay

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Semantics is a branch of linguistics which studies about meaning in language. Shortly, semantics concerns the study of meaning. There is relation among a word and the other words in semantics. It is called meaning relation. Basically, the principle of meaning relation consists of four major fields, such as synonymy, antonymy, polisemy, and hyponymy. Synonymy concerns the sameness of meaning, while antonymy concerns the oppositeness of meaning. The focus here is on antonymy which has a sense of relation, as well as synonymy. Sense is the meaning of word, especially the conceptual meaning in which it is usually derived from definition of the lexical items which can be found in dictionaries. Antonymy is oppositeness of meaning between a word and the other word or among words in the same part of speech, such as good-bad (adjective-adjective) and fast-slowly (adverb-adverb). According to Lyons (1977:286) who states that antonymy covers the relation between lexical items whose meanings stand in opposition to each other and it is often thought as the opposite of synonymy. There are 2 issues which will be discuss here ; three kinds of antonymy and problem in differentiating the type of antonymy. Palmer (1982:94-100) classifies three kinds of antonymy, those are : gradable antonymy, complementary antonymy, and relational antonymy. Gradable Antonymy This type describes something which can be measured and compared with something else. For instance, if a truck can run 260 km/hour and the other one can run 200 km/hour, the first truck is fast and the other one is slow. This type is the commonest type of antonymy. Gradable antonymy deals with the level of words, it means that there is something/anything between. For instance, the one can say today is not hot, it may mean today is not cold. There is scale or space exist between hot and cold, it is warm. The other

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