The effect of context on the (a)symmetry of Serbian adjective antonyms

Abstract

The paper deals with the symmetry of antonymic relationships of 22 polysemous Serbian adjectives, i.e. 11 posited antonym pairs, when their specific senses (primary, secondary concrete, secondary abstract) are activated within the context of a sentence or a phrase. We use data from two empirical studies conducted with participants who had the task to replace the adjective in a sentence or a phrase with its antonym. It is shown that, in both tasks, the existence and level of symmetry in terms of mutual elicitation and strength of associative relationship depends on the context in which the adjective is activated.