changing antonyms

[Lynne Murphy]

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