CONTRAST AND EQUIVALENCE OF MEANING

This paper presents an analysis of the concepts of 'death' vs. 'life', and the corresponding Hungarian adjectives 'holt' (dead): 'él_ (living), 'halott' (dead) : 'eleven' (alive). For lack of space, only the basic meanings of these adjectives are discussed, using contexts and attributive constructions taken from historical sources. It is concluded that the participle él_ has three basic meanings, two of them active and one passive: 1. 'one that lives' (intransitive), 2. 'one that makes sy live' (transitive), and 3. 'one that is lived' (passive). A fourth meaning, 'one that subsists/feeds on sg', can be seen as a subtype of the first meaning, since no direct object is involved, but it can also be considered a separate meaning. 'Eleven' and 'halott/holt' are a lot more homogeneous semantically. These pairs of opposites prove that, in many cases, antonyms are linked to one another by more intricate relationships than could be interpreted in black-and-white terms. Since life is, quite literally, a matter of life and death for human beings, various non-semantic (moral, theological, etc.) aspects necessarily ooze into these meanings. The contrast between the living and the dead, the confrontation of life and death, is neatly reflected by linguistic data, as the examples cited in this paper demonstrate. Investigations taking different points of departure and having different aims might reveal an even more intricate system of oppositions.