Somatic Antonymy: Common and Specific Features of Lexical and Phraseological Antonyms

Abstract

The evolution of society and the changes that occur in the surrounding reality also imply continuous changes in the means of verbal expression of a language. Thus, language with its phraseological micro-universe is a very complex phenomenon, susceptible to evolution and change, which is very slow to develop and leads to the emergence of new words and phrases, syntactic structures parallel to the traditional ones. In its uninterrupted dynamic, it enhances the means it offers to express our ideas and feelings more clearly, concisely and expressively. It is well known that there are phraseological units with close meanings (synonymic phraseological expressions) and those with opposite meanings (antonymic phraseological expressions), phenomena that are widespread in the creation of the phraseological treasury stricto modo. In this article we will investigate the phenomenon of somatic phraseological antonymic series and in particular we are to lay emphasis on their common and specific features. We start from the hypothesis that the use of these somatic phraseological antonymic series allows us, on the one hand, to avoid cases of ambiguity of the lexical units themselves, and on the other hand, to identify either bipolar cultural ideas or concepts within a culture. We set out to study the two types of lexical and phraseological antonymy since they complement each other and liquidate the gaps in both systems of English and Romanian polar units.