Pham Van Lam¹, Nguyen Bích Diep²

Antonymous phenomena in general and Vietnamese antonyms in specific have been studied for a long time. The results of these studies remain mainly on two points: firstly, clarifying the concept of antonyms; secondly, classifying antonyms. Setting of formal criteria that are used to identify antonymous pairs has not been studied yet. The paper aims at developing a set of formal criteria in order to easily identify and test Vietnamese antonymous pairs without encountering any counter-example that comes from the native speakers’ intuition. The paper has formulated and described the list of logical, phonetic, semantic, pragmatic, and grammatical formal criteria. In which, the criteria of grammatical formal constructions, especially the possibility of co-occurrence of antonyms, have been deeply described through some typical, real texts.

antonyms, formal criteria, co-occurrence, grammatical constructions