Contronymy In Turkish

Contronymy, which has often been described as paradigmatic sense-relations of opposition and exclusion (horizontal relations) at the micro-level, occurs when a minimum of two senses of a lexical unit contrast each other semantically. So far, studies have focussed on contronymy in German and English and have revealed that we may actually be dealing with a phenomenon which must be existing in many more languages as it seems that this is a universal linguistic feature of all natural languages. Thus, it will be interesting to scrutinize whether or not contronymy exists also in Turkish with its five different types. Therefore, this paper mainly focuses on contronymy in Turkish and the different types with relevant examples.

Keywords

Lexical Semantics, Lexical Ambiguity, Lexicology, Lexicography.