WORD CLASS, ADJECTIVAL GRADIENCE AND THE ROLE OF ANTONYMS IN A SENTENCE

Abstract

The paper analyses the antonymy on an empirical basis, and the goal is to determine whether belonging to a specifi c class of words and the possibility of comparison of adjectives have any infl uence on the use of antonyms and pragmatic value of lexical-syntactic patterns in which they occur in a sentence. The analysis is carried out by using the most comprehensive corpus of the Serbian language and it covers 50 pairs of antonyms. The obtained results show that the use of antonyms is conditioned mainly by semantic, not grammatical factors, and that the roles which adjectival antonyms have in a sentence are not dependent on their (in)comparability out of the context.