The limits of polysemy: enantiosemy

Starting with a brief overview of polysemy issues, the paper focuses on enantiosemy (or autoantonymy). Analysis of a sample of enantiosemy cases reveals that they can be divided into seven distinct groups, six of which exhibit a systematic motivated relation between the enantioseme and another polyseme. Some of the groups are analogous to subtypes of the sense relation of opposition (directionality and converseness). Hence enantiosemy complements the set of word‑internal relations recognized in the literature as holding between polysemes (autohyponymy, automeronymy, and cohyponymy, in addition to semantic shifts, metaphor and metonymy). In concluding the paper discusses the overlap between the word‑internal semantic relations between polysemes and the word‑external sense relations between different lexical items and argues for considering this phenomenon the manifestation of a general cognitive mechanism.