Linguistic perculiarities of lexical converse terms

Gorbunova Irina E.

The article is devoted to the issue of identifying characteristics of lexical converse terms in the system of the Russian language. In modern linguistics, lexical converse terms are the language units that are challenging to be identified and polysemantically interpreted. It is their ‘border’ position between synonyms and antonyms that has been causing an intensive interestin national and foreign linguists’ scientific works, objective pluralism of scientific opinions and, as a result, terminological and content-related disagreements. According to the author’s opinion, the situation that indurated in modern scientific world is determined by the linguistic origin of conversion as a lexical-semantical category of the language. An ability to express converse relations, have correlative meanings and at the same time produce denotatively identical utterances grants conversion with an inter-level linguistic status, and lexical converse terms – with the system of qualifying characteristics at the level of semantic syntax, grammar, lexical semantics and wordformation. The detailed analyses of the characteristics of lexical converse terms is accompanied with the real usage examples of lexical converse terms in the speaking manifestation of the language (texts)and their correlates in converse statements constructed by the author with the help of octantal transformation – converse binomial. Studying semantical-syntactical, grammatical, lexical-semantical and structure-semantical peculiarities of lexical converse terms gradually, the author demonstrates the coherent interpretation the issue of lexical conversion and highlights the importance of the integrative approach to studying linguistic phenomena. This cross-disciplinary interpretation of the linguistic phenomenon of conversion from the point of view of semantical syntax, grammar, lexical semantics and derivatology provides modern linguistics with the well-defined interpretation of conversion as an independent type of lexical nomination and it is beneficial to the development of the semantic relations typology in the Russian language.

Keywords:converse terms, conversion, converse relations, semantical-syntactical characteristics, grammatical characteristics, lexical-semantical characteristics, structure-semantical characteristics.