A study of antonymy in Setswana

Abstract

Antonymy is regarded as one of the important sense relations. While traditionally it was taken as the opposite of synonymy, it is defined as opposition drawn along some dimension of similarity, and also in terms of negation and componential analysis. It is thus oppositeness of meaning irrespective of whether we deal with binary or non-binary contrasts. In the discussion of different types of antonyms, their morphology, syntactic and semantic use is also highlighted. The differences and relatedness between them is shown by looking at their various characteristics.