ENANTIOSEMY AS A LINGUISTIC PHENOMENON: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES AND THEORETICAL APPROACHES
Keywords:
enantiosemy, contronyms, lexical semantics, semantic opposition, polysemy, antonymyAbstract
Enantiosemy, the coexistence of opposite meanings within a single lexical unit, is one of the most paradoxical yet systematic phenomena in semantics. The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive examination of enantiosemy by tracing its historical development, exploring major scholarly interpretations, and assessing its theoretical implications for modern linguistics. A historical-descriptive and comparative method is employed, drawing on sources from Arabic philology, classical European linguistics, and contemporary semantic theory. The findings reveal that enantiosemy has been viewed either as a subtype of polysemy, as a context-dependent pragmatic phenomenon, or as an independent semantic category. Examples across languages—including English, Latin, Russian, and Uzbek—demonstrate its cross-linguistic universality. However, the persistence of terminological inconsistencies (contronyms, Janus words, auto-antonyms) continues to fragment the field. This study concludes that a unified conceptual framework is necessary to ensure theoretical clarity and comparability, positioning enantiosemy as a stable and universal feature of natural language.
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