Antonymy and co-occurence in Turkish

Opposition and classification by opposition is such a relation that effect intensively both the history of humanity and philosophy at the intellectual level and to direct our lives at the daily basis. For this reason, antonym, which is the lexical side of the opposition relations, has attracted the intense attention of researchers in every period. Structuralist semantics researchers such as; Cruse (1986), Kempson (1977), Lyons (1977), and Leech (1981) classifed this relation in logical bases with entailment rules due to its paradigmatic nature. Researchers like Clark (1970) and Deese (1965) have examined the psychological aspects and associative characteristics of the relation and along with the attention paid by researchers such as Justesen and Katz (1991) and Fellbaum (1995) to the syntagmatic and co-occurence features of the relationship, many researchers, beginning with Jones (2002), have carried out studies on the discourse functions of antonymy in various languages. Since we realized the barrenness of the Turkish literature on the subject, we conducted this research in order to fill a gap in our literature in this field and attract the attention of researchers to it. In our study, firstly, a summary of the literature on canonical antonyms was given, then, with a sample set consisting of 50 pairs, the discourse functions, semantic and pragmatic features, syntactic patterns, and statistical aspects of canonical antonym pairs in Turkish were examined with the sample we created from the TUD database, and all these data were compared with other studies in the literature.