Antonyms are words belonging to the same part of speech, identical in style, expressing contrary or contradictory notions.
V.N. Comissarov in his dictionary of antonyms classified them into two groups : absolute or root antonyms /»late» - «early»/ and derivational antonyms / «to please’ - «to displease»/. Derivational and root antonyms are different in their structure and semantically. Derivational antonyms express contradictory notions, one of them excludes the other, e.g. «active»- «inactive». Absolute antonyms express contrary notions - «ugly» and «beautiful».
There are three types of oppositeness:
a) complementary, e.g. male -female, married -single,
b) antonyms, e.g. good -bad,
c) converseness, e.g. to buy - to sell.
Antonymy is the second class of oppositeness. It is distinguished from complimentarity by being based on different logical relationships. For pairs of antonyms like good/bad, big/small only the second one of the above mentioned relations of implication holds.
An important linguistic difference from complementaries is that antonyms are always fully gradable, e.g. hot, warm, tepid, cold.
Converseness is mirror-image relations or functions, e.g. husband/wife, pupil/teacher, preceed/follow, above/below, before/after etc.
If a word is polysemantic it can have several antonyms, e.g. the word «bright» has the antonyms «dim», «dull», «sad».
