Conceptual Enantiosemy

Abstract

This article discusses the phenomenon of enantiosemy, offers a general overview of the history of its development and also presents the main types of enantiosemy. The main attention is paid to the consideration of cognitive signs of enantiosemy in English, Russian and Uzbek languages. The research is mainly done on associations of interviewees. The purpose of this article is to present and prove a new type of enantiosemy “conceptual enantiosemy” through deep research. The main methods of the research were the survey method. This article proves that each person perceives words differently, either in a negative or in a positive aspect. Interviewees (different levelled students, teachers) were to write the very first associations to the data in questionnaire that consisted of thirty words in three languages, regardless of the part of the speech, whether that word would be a noun, adjective or verb. From the results, antonymic pairs of word associations were analyzed, which were the proof to the existence of conceptual enantiosemy.