Komissarov’s approach to antonyms:

2 words are antonymous if:

1) they are regularly contrasted in actual speech, or the contrast in their meanings is proved by definite types of contextual co-occurrence.

2) There is the possibility of substitution

3) They have identical lexical valency.

Unlike synonyms, antonyms don’t differ either in style, emotional coloring or distribution. They are interchangeable at least in some contexts. As antonyms do not differ stylistically, an antonymic substitution never changes the stylistic coloring.

The possibility of substitution and identical valency show that semantic polarity is a very special kind of difference implying a great deal of sameness.

11. Semantic fields and other types of English vocabulary word groups

Morphological grouping

On the morphological level words are divided into four groups according to their morphological structure, namely the number and type of morphemes which compose them. They are:

1. Root or morpheme words. Their stem contains one free morpheme, e.g. dog, hand.

2. Derivatives contain no less than two morphemes of which at least one is bound: dogged, handy, handful, sometimes both are bound: terrier.

3. Compound words consist of not less than two free morphemes, the presence of bound morphemes is possible but not necessary: handful, blackbird.

4. Compound derivatives consist of not less than two free morphemes and one bound morpheme referring to the whole combination. The pattern is (stem + stem) + affix, e.g. long-legged, left-handed.

Another type of traditional lexicological grouping is known as word families. The number of groups is certainly much greater, being equal to the number of root morphemes if all words are grouped to the number of root morphemes, e.g. dog, doggish, dogless, doglike, to dog, dog-wolf, dog-cart, etc. Similar grouping according to a common suffix or prefix are also possible, e.g. gladsome, handsome, lonesome etc.

The next step is classifying words not in isolation but taking them within actual utterances. The division here is between notional words and form or functional words. It is only notional words that can stand alone and yet have meaning and form a complete utterance. (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives).

Form or functional words, empty words or auxiliaries are lexical units which are called words, although they do not conform to the definition of the word, because they are used only in combination with notional words or in reference to them. This group comprises auxiliary verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections, etc.

Lexico-grammatical groups

By a lexico-grammatical group we understand a class of words which have a common lexico-grammatical meaning, a common paradigm, the same substituting elements and possibly a characteristic set of suffixes rendering the lexico-grammatical meaning. These groups are subsets of the part of speech, several lexico-grammatical groups constitute one part of speech. Thus, English nouns are subdivided approximately into the following lexico-grammatical groups: personal names, animal names, collective names, abstract nouns, material nouns, object nouns, proper names, etc.

Lexico-grammatical groups should not be confused with parts of speech. Audience and honesty, for instance, belong to the same part of speech but to different lexico-grammatical groups because their lexico-grammatical meaning is different.

Thematic and Ideographic Groups

The Theory of Semantic Field

A further subdivision within the lexico-grammatical groups is achieved in the well-known thematic subgroups, such as terms of kinship, names for parts of the human body, color terms, military terms and so on. The basis of grouping this time is not only linguistic but also extra-linguistic: the words are associated because the things they name occur together are closely connected in reality.

Different Types of Non-Semantic Grouping

The simplest, most obvious non-semantic grouping, extensively used in all branches of applied linguistics is the alphabetical organization of written words, as represented in most dictionaries.

The rhyming, i.e. inverse dictionary presents a similar non-semantic grouping of isolated written words, differing from the first in that the sound is also taken into consideration and the words are arranged according to the similarity of their ends.

A third type of non-semantic grouping of written words is based on their length, i.e. the number of letters they contain. This type may be useful for automatic reading of messages and correction of mistakes.

Finally, a very important type of non-semantic grouping for isolated lexical units is based on a statistical analysis of their frequency. It shows important correlation between quantitative and qualitative characteristics of lexical units, the most frequent words being polysemantic and stylistically neutral.