A Comparative Analysis of Functions of Accidental Binary Oppositions from Different Semantic Levels: Functions of the Word Pairs chrześcijanin/muzułmanin and katolik/protestant in Sentences from the National Corpus of Polish

The article presents a comparative analysis of two pairs of words regarded as accidental semantic binary oppositions, belonging to different levels of generality: chrześcijanin ‘Christian’ and muzułmanin ‘Muslim’ (the names of followers of two major religions) and katolik ‘Catholic’ and protestant ‘Protestant’ (hyponyms of the word chrześcijanin as the names of the main denominations within the Christian religion). The analysis sought to identify the functions performed by pairs of words connected by the relation of semantic opposition, co-occurring within a sentence. The analysis covered a set of 538 sentences selected from the balanced sub-corpus of the National Corpus of Polish. In the analysed sentences, it was possible to identify most of the functions from the sets proposed in earlier studies on inherent binary semantic oppositions. The percentage share of most functions is similar for both analysed pairs. The three most common functions are the same; moreover, they have similar or even the same relative frequence. The relations between the denotations of the members of a given pair, shown in sentences with the two most common functions, are also similar for both analysed pairs.