THE INTERFACE BETWEEN COGNITIVE METAPHOR AND ENANTIOSEMY: CONVERGENCES AND DIVERGENCES IN MEANING CONSTRUCTION

Abstract

This paper examines the theoretical relationship between cognitive (conceptual) metaphor and enantiosemy, two phenomena that are frequently confused by students of cognitive semantics because both involve a single form carrying more than one, seemingly incompatible, meaning. Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory and recent corpus-based work on enantiosemy, the paper argues that the two categories are cognitively related but structurally and functionally distinct: metaphor is a mapping mechanism that generates new meaning across conceptual domains, whereas enantiosemy is a semantic outcome - the coexistence of opposite senses within one lexical unit - that can, among other routes, arise through metaphorical extension. The paper outlines the shared cognitive basis of both phenomena, then specifies the criteria that separate them: directionality, domain structure, disambiguation mechanism, and diachronic status.