At school, in the lessons of the Russian language, they begin to study what is antonym from the 2nd grade, and in the future they periodically supplement the knowledge about this concept. So, translated from Greek, it literally means: “against” - anti and “name” - onoma. This term can only be applied to a couple of words. For one word, never! So, antonyms are words with a lexically opposite meaning (for example, harmful - useful antonyms).
In such pairs only words of one part of speech can enter:
- a noun with a noun;
- adjective with an adjective;
- a verb with a verb;
- adverb with adverb;
- Communion with the sacrament;
- participle with participle;
- preposition with a preposition.
Do not form such pairs:
- almost all pronouns;
- words that indicate gender (a woman and a man are not an antonymic couple);
- nouns with substantive meaning (for example, a book, a house, etc.);
- proper names (it is impossible to pick up a contrasting pair with the words "Moscow", "Russia", "Pavel", "Murka", etc.);
- numerals.
Restrictions on the formation of such pairs:
- different styling;
- words with diminutive and magnifying suffixes (for example, rain - rain - rain).
Antonymy of polysemantic words
Meaningful words deserve special attention. For example, the word fresh has several meanings. For each of them, you can choose your own antonymic pair:
- fresh bread - stale bread;
- fresh linen - dirty linen;
- fresh wind - hot wind;
Considering what the antonym of a polysemantic word is, it is important to understand that it is also possible to pair with the same word between its different meanings. For example, the verb "browse". The first meaning of this word is "to get acquainted, to see something." The second meaning is "not to see, not to notice, to miss."
The difference in antonyms in structure:
- single-root (for example, silent - noisy);
- multi-root (for example, courage - fear).
This phenomenon in the language made it possible to build stylistic figures. This is not just knowledge of what antonyms are, it is the ability to create different images using language.
The first phenomenon is the antithesis
It is built on a sharp contrast between the meanings of words, thanks to which many people remember the names of the classic works “War and Peace”, “Fathers and Sons”, “Fat and Thin”, etc.
The second phenomenon is oxymoron
This figure is based on a combination of words that are opposite in meaning. Among the literary names using oxymoron can be called "Hot Snow", "Living Corpse", "Dead Souls".
Thanks to a clear knowledge of what antonym is, these stylistic figures can easily be identified while studying literature.
In addition, in the Russian language it is customary to distinguish the following antonyms:
- General linguistic - commonly used in everyday life and in literary texts (for example, night - day);
- contextual - words that become antonyms only within a specific context (for example, “Wolves and Sheeps”).
The ambiguous word, homonym, synonym, antonym makes speech richer and more interesting, they are often used in proverbs and sayings, literary texts and colloquial speech.
To fix the antonyms, there are specialized dictionaries recommended by the Ministry of Education, edited by L. Vvedenskaya, N.P. Kolesnikova, M.R. Lvov
