Of attractive women and unattractive men. A linguistic study of perfect antonymy in two-word phrases

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics grade: 10 Free University of Berlin (Englische Philologie) course: Sementics language: English abstract: In the English (and any other) language antonymy belongs to the most interesting aspects which linguists may come across. Human beings think and speak in categories. Thus they classify every word into groups by referring to one or several (suppositionally) equal characteristics of these words. In this respect antonymy is simply a particular manner of categorization but a rather keen one for its being based on the strong (albeit rarely logical ) differentiation from other words. Consequently an antonym cannot occur on its own terms; it always needs another word to which it refers. Much has been written about antonymy (Lyons 1977 Cruse 1992 Cruse 1995 Murphy 2006 et. al.). Yet as far as is known no scientific study has ever been conducted of a phenomenon that is to be called perfect antonymy and is related to the antonymy of entire phrases. This concept means that all single parts of a group of at least two words are turned into the opposite as can bee seen in [1iiid] of the example [Example 1].