Contronymy and Semantic Primes

Abstract

Contronymy, that is sense opposition invoked by one word, can pose a serious conundrum from a theoretical standpoint. Nonetheless, the prime concern of this paper is to introduce the phenomenon into a broader discussion within theoretical linguistics. To be more specific, the question at hand is: what kind of comprehensive and coherent theoretical construct can be adequate for semantic representation of contronymy? It will be demonstrated that the particular sense opposition can be classified as being linked with direct negation. A theoretical vantage point will be presented that addresses the cause of opposition via the means of the natural semantic metalanguage theory. This approach may shed some light on how to deal with the problem from a cognitive perspective. The underlying methodological assumptions of the presented framework, based on the idea of semantic primes, prove to be a coherent tool for encapsulating radical sense opposition manifested by contronyms. As an addendum to this prolegomena there will also be presented a brief discussion of some of the implications of contronymy for fields such as the theory of the human mind, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, machine translations and big data structures.