A review of the approaches to enantiosemy in linguistics in the XI century

The phenomenon “enantiosemy”, commonly understood as the coexistence of two opposing meanings within one linguistic form, has been discussed for more than a century, yet the field remains theoretically fragmented. This article offers a historical comparative review of major approaches to enantiosemy, with the aim of clarifying how the phenomenon has been conceptualized from early descriptive accounts to contemporary cognitive-pragmatic models. The study adopts a qualitative review design. It investigates research on English, French, German, Slavic and Turkic language materials, drawing on theoretically influential and methodologically different studies published mainly between 2008 and 2025. Furthermore, it also acknowledged earlier historical perspectives frequently cited in these literatures. This discussion argues that the most productive current understanding of enantiosemy is multidimensional: it requires simultaneous attention to lexical structure, semantic history, cognitive construal, contextual activation and socio-discursive stabilization.