Page 49 - 6807
P. 49
special literature among technical terms and others (fatherland –
motherland; suslik - gopher.
Some authors class groups like ask - beg - implore, or like -
love ~ adore, gift - talent - genius, famous - celebrate - eminent as
relative synonyms, as they denote different degree of the same
notion or different shades of meanings and can be substituted only
in some contexts.
Contextual or context-dependent synonyms are similar in
meaning only under some specific distributional conditions. It may
happen that the difference between the meanings of two words is
contextually neutralized (buy and get would not generally be taken
as synonymous, but they arc synonyms in the following examples
– I'll go to the shop and buy some bread and I'll go to the shop and
get some bread).
4. Antonymy
Antonyms may be defined as two or rarely more words of
the same language belonging to the same part of speech identical
in style and nearly identical in distribution, associated and used
together so that their denotative meanings render contrary or
contradictory notions Antonymy is not evenly distributed among
the categories of parts of speech. Most antonyms are adjectives,
which seems to be natural because qualitative characteristics are
easily compared and contrasted: high - low, wide — narrow,
strong — weak, old—young, friendly - hostile. Verbs take second
place, so far as antonymy is concerned. Yet, verbal pairs of
antonyms are fewer in number: to lose - to find, to live - to die, to
open - to close, to weep - to laugh. Nouns are not rich in antonyms,
but even so some examples can be given: friend'- enemy, joy -
grief, good - evil, heaven - earth, love - hatred.
5. Euphemism
49