Antonymie et exhaustivité

Only a few studies are dedicated to the copresence of conventional antonyms. Among these studies, the corpus-based description of discourse functions fulfilled through antonyms, made by Steven Jones (2002), became a reference. We will focus our communication on one function in particular: the coordinated antonymy, supported by syntactic frames such as X and/or Y, where X and Y are antonyms. Through this function, the antonymic copresence can express exhaustiveness, that is to say all points of a semantic scale, according to Jones (2002:66). By searching into a French corpus constituted by articles from Le Monde (1987-2002 and 2010-2011), we found examples of antonyms which express exhaustiveness within syntactic frames similar to those identified by Jones, but also within syntactic frames not associated with coordinated antonymy, like equality comparisons, for example : « Les absences de Federer sont aussi intenses que sa présence. » (Le Monde 02/06/2011). In light of these examples, two questions arise: 1) What are the syntactic structures that allow antonyms to express completeness?; 2) How to define semantically and referentially the exhaustiveness expressed by antonyms in copresence? To answer the first question, we will present an analysis of syntactic and semantic conditions in which antonyms express completeness. This analysis will be based on the method of describing the relationship between predicates and arguments proposed by Gaston Gross (2012), and useful for describing the relationship between antonyms and other elements of their co-text. To answer the second question, we will describe antonyms as lexemes who designate referential prototypical categories. In this perspective, exhaustiveness subsumes the difference between two categories designated by antonyms to express a totality in regard to a semantic dimension (see Mettinger 1994).