Enantiosémie jako výsledek vývojových procesů
Enantiosemy as a result of evolutionary processes

Summary/Abstract: Enantiosemy describes a situation in which a lexical unit acquires opposing meanings as a result of long-term semantic development. In this article, using several examples from Old Czech, I show how the enantiosemic status of words results from the development of lexical units or (sub-)systems. In the first example, the verb <i>ublížit</i> (to harm) has gained (on the background of words <i>blízký</i>, <i>bližní</i>, <i>přiblížit</i>, etc.) negative conceptual content through the systemic usage of the directional meaning of the prefix <i>u-</i>. In another example, the verb <i>odpravit</i> has changed its meaning from ‘to arrange regularly’ to ‘to murder’ during its own complicated semantic development (‘to make sth rightly’→‘to punish sb rightly’→‘to put sb to death’→‘to murder’). Finally, it is shown that the meanings ‘to love’ and ‘to hate’ of the Old Czech verb <i>náviděti</i> have become the result of a double progressive artificially-created opposition to the initial common Slavic <i>nenáviděti</i> – the previous concept, presented both in linguistic and in popular literature on its polysemy, is thus incorrect.

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