Realization of contrast relations in the synonymic and antonymic complex “hot - cold”

The paper focuses on the research of the synonymic and antonymic complex “hot ↔ cold”. The novelty of the research is to identify lexical units of the Russian language which are contrasted to each other as parts of this synonymic and antonymic complex. Definition of the opposed lexico-semantic word sets within the structure of this complex is also relevant. The analysis showed that antonymic relations are formed by the lexemes with contrastive semantics, as well as lexico-semantic groups of lexemes: synonymic rows with one-word antonyms; antonymous synonymic rows including a large number of lexical units; synonymic and antonymic complexes consisting of semantically correlating groups of words connected by paradigmatic relations. Interpretation of universal concepts hot and cold is carried out through lexemes of different categorial and grammatical character with the prevalence of verbal representations.