Discourse Function of Lexical Antonymy in Persian Language

Discourse function of lexical antonymy was initially introduced in Jones (2002). In that theoretical model، main classes of discourse functions were labeled as ancillary، coordinated، distinguished، transitive، negated، comparative and idiom. The present study attempted to examine the discourse function of antonymy across a natural corpus of Persian language. The corpus included 16 Persian texts from which 1000 sentences are extracted. Each sentence represents one antonymous pair. The findings show that from among four lexical categories، i. e. adjective، noun، verb and adverb، the adjective category outnumbers other categories in making antonymous pairs. Two Persian word-pairs ‘chap-rAst’ (left-right) and ‘bAlA-pA’in’ (up-down) proved to be the most frequent antonymous word pairs. The results showed that unlike English، Swedish and Japanese where the ancillary discourse function tops the function classes، in Persian the most frequent function is coordination. The high frequency of idiomatic function confirms the claim that a function of antnymy in Persian makes idioms and proverbs.