What does the word antonym mean? What are synonyms and antonyms in Russian. Examples in language and literature

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. You often hear arguments about this, but you don’t have to be a philologist to understand that learning Russian is a real feat.

Especially considering the presence of a large number of words that are comparable in meaning, but often completely different in spelling (). Or, conversely, different in meaning, but identical in spelling (). But there are also words that sound the same, but differ in spelling ().

In this regard, we only have to find out what antonyms are, what role they play in the Russian language and whether we can do without them, in principle.

Looking ahead, I will say that without them, the lexical beauty of the Russian language would have suffered significant damage. To understand this, it is enough to turn to our classics, who often used this technique in their work.

What is an antonym?

In short, this is the opposite of synonyms (different words that mean approximately the same thing, such as “cheerful - joyful”, “traveler - traveler”). In the case of an antonym, the definition will sound like this:

these are the words that have opposite meanings(opposed to each other), but necessarily belonging to the same part of speech. For example, “day - night”, “bright - dark”, “walk - stand”, “cold - warm”.

The word itself is a derivative of the ancient Greek words ἀντί, meaning “against” and ὄνομα, meaning “name”:

It turns out that antonyms are most often two words (lexical oppositions), belonging to the same part of speech, which can be:

Numerals, pronouns and proper names, as well as words belonging to different parts of speech, do not have antonyms. There are many words in the Russian language that cannot be contrasted, but in this case it can be found figuratively.

Please note that the figurative meaning of the same word may differ in different contexts.

For example, we can say “old” and “young” about an animal of different ages (wolf, goose, ram), but we cannot describe a car, a machine tool, a sofa in the same way. They can also be old, but there is no such expression as a “young” car (sofa, machine). In this case, another antonym, “new,” would be better suited.

And there are quite a lot of such examples, so it’s impossible to explain in a nutshell what this is (as well as about synonyms, paronyms and homonyms). I’m not talking about foreigners - for them this is a direct path to the “yellow house”.

Types of antonyms, according to what criteria they are divided

Speaking about the types of autonomous entities, we can highlight:

Now let’s consolidate the learned material by watching a short video on the topic, without missing anything interesting:

Examples of various antonyms

The lexical set of the Russian language is so rich that it takes foreigners a lifetime to understand what synonyms, antonyms and homonyms are. In this regard, it is incomparably easier for native speakers.

There are the following types of antonymic words and expressions:

It is obvious that without these lexical embellishments our language would be boring and uninteresting. Without them, how could you describe a person who has the complete opposite of another personality or convey experiences and feelings.

Thus, several concepts can be contrasted at once, as in the example of “loving good and hating evil.”

Antonyms in Russian proverbs

We can talk a lot about how useful antonyms are, and how difficult it is without them, but it’s better to look at examples. In this regard, Russian proverbs and sayings illustrate the material well.

Everyone, for example, understands the meaning of the proverb, which says that “a sleigh must be prepared in the summer, and a cart in the winter.” Antonyms enhance the effect. Each of us knows that “the well-fed is no companion to the hungry,” “the morning is wiser than the evening,” and “the bins of a bad owner are sometimes thick and sometimes empty.”

Sometimes the opposite is indicated by entire phrases. For example, about a rich person you can say that “he has no money,” but a poor person has it “like a cat crying.” You can also “keep your eyes open”, or you can “count crows”, “live on your own hump” or “sit on someone else’s neck”.

The Russian language is truly rich, and you won’t envy those who have to learn it “from scratch,” because how can you explain to a foreigner what “seven spans in the forehead” is and how the expression “without a king in the head” is different.

And in conclusion, check how correctly you have mastered the material and understood what an antonym is:

Good luck to you! See you soon on the pages of the blog site

What are synonyms

Agree, it would be quite boring to communicate if each object could be named only in one single way. You look at the sun, and you can’t say: light, bright, radiant. You only need to choose one thing. It would be very boring, and the speech would be meager and not rich.

Synonyms are words that have the same meaning but are spelled differently. As you may have guessed, there are a lot of synonyms. For example, a swimming pool and a pond. The meaning is the same, but it is written differently. Another example: house, building, hut, structure, construction, real estate, dwelling. Continue on your own?

In various cases, words may be synonyms, but they may not be, depending on the context, or they may not be suitable in meaning. For example, cherry blossom can also be called red, but cherry pie is not necessarily red.

Assignment: come up with synonyms for the words: dog, animal, liquid.

What are antonyms

In contrast to synonyms, there are antonyms - words that have opposite meanings. They write differently and have the exact opposite meaning. For example, black - white, good - evil, come - go, start - finish.

This does not mean at all that we use antonyms every day and consciously remember them, rummaging through our memory, but understanding them and being able to quickly select several oppositions in our minds is a sign of education and erudition.

Assignment: choose antonyms for the words: morning, winter, end.

What are homonyms

The last term for today is homonyms - these are words that are spelled the same, but have completely different meanings. It just so happens that the Russian alphabet does not have a thousand letters, otherwise it would be impossible to remember them all. Therefore, the spellings of words are repeated, which, depending on the context, mean different meanings.

For example, the key can be for a door lock, a treble key in sheet music, in the form of a pond, or a wrench. All these will be completely different objects, but they will be written the same way - the word key. Second example: a scythe used to cut grass, as well as a long braid of hair.

Task: what meanings of the following words can you remember: outfit, caress, flying.

(from the Greek anti - against, ónyma - name) - these are words with the opposite meaning when used in pairs. Those words enter into antonymic relationships which reveal from opposite sides correlated concepts associated with one circle of objects and phenomena. Words form antonymous pairs based on their lexical meaning. The same word, if it is polysemantic, can have several antonyms.

occur within all parts of speech, but the words of the antonymous pair must belong to the same part of speech.

The following do not enter into antonymic relationships:

– nouns with a specific meaning (house, book, school), proper names;

– numerals, most pronouns;

– words denoting gender (man and woman, son and daughter);

– words with different stylistic connotations;

- words with increasing or diminutive accents (hand - hands, house - house).

In their structure, antonyms are not homogeneous. Among them are:

– single-root antonyms: happiness - misfortune, open - close;

– antonyms with different roots: black - white, good - bad.

The phenomenon of antonymy is closely related to the polysemy of a word. Each meaning of a word can have its own antonyms. Yes, word fresh will have different antonymic pairs in different meanings: fresh wind - sultry wind, fresh bread - stale bread, fresh shirt - dirty shirt.

Antonymic relationships can also arise between different meanings of the same word. For example, to review means “to get acquainted with something, check, quickly examining, looking through, reading” and “to skip, not to notice, to miss.” The combination of opposite meanings in one word is called enantiosemy.

Depending on the distinctive features that words with opposite meanings have, two types of antonyms can be distinguished general language(or simply linguistic) And contextual speech(copyright or individual).

General language antonyms are regularly reproduced in speech and enshrined in the vocabulary (day - night, poor - rich).

Contextual speech antonyms- these are words that enter into antonymic relationships only in a certain context: Sing better with a goldfinch than with a nightingale.

The use of antonyms makes speech more vivid and expressive. Antonyms are used in colloquial and artistic speech, in many proverbs and sayings, in the titles of many literary works.

One of the stylistic figures is built on the sharp opposition of antonym words - antithesis(contrast) – characterization by comparing two opposing phenomena or signs: Long live the sun, may the darkness hide! (A.S. Pushkin). Writers often construct titles of works using this technique: “War and Peace” (L.N. Tolstoy), “Fathers and Sons” (I.S. Turgenev), “Fat and Thin” (A.P. Chekhov), etc. .

Another stylistic device that is based on a comparison of antonymic meanings is oxymoron, or oxymoron(Gr. oxymoron - lit. witty-stupid) - a figure of speech that combines logically incompatible concepts: a living corpse, dead souls, ringing silence.

Antonym dictionaries will help you find an antonym for a word.Antonym dictionaries– linguistic reference dictionaries, which provide descriptions of antonyms. For example, in dictionary L.A. Vvedenskaya An interpretation of more than 1000 antonymic pairs is given (their synonymous correspondences are also taken into account), and contexts of use are given. A in the dictionary N.P. Kolesnikova Antonyms and paronyms are recorded. The book contains approximately 3,000 paronyms and more than 1,300 pairs of antonyms. There are no illustrations of the use of antonyms in the dictionary.

In addition to general antonym dictionaries, there are also private dictionaries that record polar relations in some narrow areas of vocabulary. This includes, for example, dictionaries of antonyms-phraseological units, dictionaries of antonyms-dialecticisms, etc.

Let us once again pay attention to the most common examples of antonyms: good evil; good bad; friend - enemy; day Night; heat - cold; peace - war, quarrel; true False; success - failure; benefit - harm; rich - poor; difficult - easy; generous - stingy; thick – thin; hard – soft; brave - cowardly; White black; fast – slow; high Low; bitter - sweet; hot Cold; wet – dry; full - hungry; new - old; big small; laugh - cry; speak - remain silent; love - hate.

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Antonyms are words that belong to the same part of speech, differ in sound and spelling, and have exactly the opposite meaning. Belonging to one part of speech is not the only condition by which words that have opposite meanings can be called antonyms; there must be a common feature between such words, for example, when both concepts describe feeling, time, space, quantity, quality, etc.

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For example, “before” and “now”. In this case, both words are adverbs; they have opposite concepts and refer to the same attribute - the description of time (“when? now” or “when? before”).

What Wikipedia says

Antonyms(translated from Greek αντί- means “against” + όνομα “name”) are words of the same part of speech of directly opposite lexical meaning, having differences in spelling and sound: lie - truth, evil - good, be silent - speak .

Words with opposite meanings have relatively recently become the subject of linguistic analysis, which is why interest in the study of Tatar and Russian antonymy has increased significantly. In addition, this led to the emergence of a number of linguistic studies and various dictionaries of antonyms.

In the vocabulary of a language, lexical units are closely related not only because of the connection of contiguity and similarity, but also because of the semantic variants of polysemantic words. They do not always contain a feature that can be contrasted, therefore they cannot have antonymic relationships in a literal sense, but in a figurative sense they acquire an antonym.

Thus, contextual antonyms can have an antonymic relationship with a direct meaning, carry an emphatic load and perform a special stylistic function in a sentence.

It is permissible to apply them to words whose meanings reflect qualitatively opposite shades, while the basis of their meanings is always a common feature (height, weight, time of day, feeling, etc.); also, only those words that belong to the same stylistic or grammatical category can be contrasted.

Linguistic antonyms cannot be words belonging to different parts of speech or lexical levels. Also among antonyms there are no numerals, pronouns and proper names.

Types of antonym concepts expressed include:

Types of antonyms by structure:

cognate- are formed with the help of prefixes that are opposite in meaning (for example: move in - leave) or with the help of prefixes added to the main word (for example: monopoly - antimonopoly);
multi-rooted- having different roots (for example: back and forth).

From the point of view of speech and language, antonyms are divided into two types: contextual and linguistic:

Language or usual antonyms take place in the language system (for example: poor - rich);
Contextual- speech, contextual, occasional antonyms arise in a certain context; often found in sayings and proverbs. In order to check or determine this type, it is necessary to reduce opposite words to a language pair (for example: golden - half copper, or expensive - cheap).

Antonymous pairs are distinguished according to their action; they can be proportional or disproportionate:

Proportional represent action and reaction (examples: going to bed - getting up, getting poor - getting rich);
Disproportionate express action and its absence in the broad sense of the word (for example: think up - think about it, light up - extinguish).

Examples in language and literature

We quietly enter September... into the forest not uncommon… V thick, the trees there aren’t Judas... without grumbling, without daring; month of knot confusion, there good visiting evil…

In this example, contradictory correlates are applicable (sparse - dense, good - evil). The following antonymic pairs belong to the same type of expressed concepts:

Let's look at other examples:

child - teenager - adult(contrary correlators);
come - go(same root antonyms);
laugh - cry(commensurate antonyms);
win - lose(conversions);
counter-revolution - revolution(vector correlators).

Pair systems

Antonyms usually form a pair correlation in Russian, as can be seen in examples in various dictionaries. However, this does not mean at all that there can be only one word with the opposite meaning.

Antonymous relations allow opposing concepts to be shown in the so-called “unclosed” polynomial series (for example: concrete - abstract, abstract; cheerful - sad, boring, dull, sad).

In addition, each member of an antonymic series or pair may have synonyms that do not intersect in antonymic relationships. In this case, a kind of system is formed in which antonymic units are located horizontally, and synonymous ones are located vertically.

Here are examples of such a system: