Enantiosemy – Classification and Categories in а Contrastive Aspect

Abstract

The paper discusses the phenomenon of enantiosemy in linguistics – its nature, appearance and belonging to one of the following groups: polysemy, homonymy or antonymy. The enantiosemy theme has been in the scope of linguists for more than century and a half. At the beginning it was believed that this phenomenon could be examined only in Slavic languages, because some of the first findings for it were in Russian, Chech and Bulgarian. Nowadays enantiosemy examples are excerpted in French, German, English and other non – Slavic languages. It is an attempt to classify different research approaches and to describe a new type of enantiosemy, from a contrastive perspective, which in this paper is called affixal enantiosemy. In accordance with a certain context, the affixal enantiosemy clarifies the semantics of the affix which is part of a lexeme.