changing antonyms

Dennis R. Preston preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU
Wed May 24 20:01:05 UTC 2000


Well, "hussy' and "housewife" were synonymous (at one time); now some folks
would reckon they were antonyms. Hardly canonical.

dInIs

>Hi all,
>
>I'm looking for examples of semantic change in which (at least) one
>member of an antonym pair changed meaning, such that at least one of the
>original pair ended up with a different antonym than it had before.
>Another good type of example would be one in which semantic change
>happened in one dialect but not another, so that a single word has
>different antonyms in two dialects.  I don't know if such things exist.
>
>
>What I am _not_ looking for is cases in which a word has several
>possible antonyms depending on the jargon/register/other sense in use.
>I'm looking for cases in which two words were antonyms, but they're not
>anymore.
>
>By 'antonym' here, I mean a kind of 'canonical' opposite.  E.g., 'hot'
>and 'cool' are opposed in meaning, but the canonical opposition is
>'hot'/'cold'.
>
>I'd be happy to hear of examples in any language--and in fact, lexical
>borrowing might provide some interesting examples.
>
>Hopefully,
>Lynne
>
>
>Dr M Lynne Murphy
>Lecturer in Linguistics
>School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
>University of Sussex
>Brighton BN1 9QH
>UK
>
>phone +44-(0)1273-678844
>fax   +44-(0)1273-671320


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736



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