ENANTIOSEMY IN DISCOURSE: PRAGMATIC MECHANISMS OF IRONY AND IMPLICIT MEANING

Abstract

Enantiosemy - the coexistence of opposite meanings within a single lexical item, sits at the intersection of lexical semantics and pragmatics. Prior scholarship has examined the phenomenon chiefly from semantic and diachronic perspectives (Lyons, 1977; Klégr, 2013), while its realization in live discourse remains comparatively under-described. This study investigates how irony and pragmatic inference activate enantiosemic readings in authentic discourse, and, departing from the earlier draft of this paper, grounds the analysis in documented corpus and discourse-pragmatic evidence rather than in constructed illustrative examples alone. Drawing on a discoursepragmatic framework informed by Grice's (1975) theory of conversational implicature and Sperber and Wilson's (1995) Relevance Theory, the study reexamines canonical and corpus-attested cases of verbal irony (Wilson & Sperber, 1992; Attardo, 2000; Garassino et al., 2022) alongside enantiosemy's own irony/anti-irony subtype identified by Klégr (2013). The analysis shows that opposite meanings are recovered through contextual incongruity and inferential reasoning rather than through lexical meaning alone, and situates enantiosemy explicitly within the broader irony-comprehension literature (Milosavljevic, Pouscoulous, & Mazzarella, 2025; Hess Zimmermann, AvecillaRamírez, & Castillo Romo, 2024; Lozano-Palacio & Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, 2024). The revised study also specifies its object of comparison, states its point of novelty relative to this literature, and outlines a corpus-based direction - including Uzbek material (Abdullaeva & Ruziyeva, 2025; Murodova & Djumabayeva, 2017) - for the empirical study this theoretical framework is designed to support.