Antonymy is an interesting semantic relationship. I think the emphasis in antynomic juxtapositions is reasonably analyzed as being one of contrasting direction. Antonymy appears to require a linear order, either continuous or discrete. In the structurally simplest case, binary opposition, the direction is degenerate, but in other cases it is well understood as a positioned vector.

True and false, in a boolean world, are mutually exclusive antonyms. In a multivalent world, they may be considered as extremes or as degrees. When considered as degrees, they represent both domains and directions. The extremity of absolute falsehood lies outside the domain of true, and likewise the symmetric case. For the points which are not suprema of the continuum, truth applies in degree, but the essential concept of truth is the direction in which that degree increases to it’s absolute extreme. When verity is considered without a supremum, we have number. Positive and negative are directions with mutually exclusive domains. Clockwise is a direction of motion, valid over all positions of a rotational domain, along with counterclockwise. They are positionally co-extensive, but directionally opposite.

Dark and light are similar to true and false in a compact set. When colors are opposed, their antonymic signification is the direction along the line between poles representing the paradigmatic exemplar. The perceptual opposites, red and green, for example, in antynomic signification, have a domain which may expand or contract to include or exclude grays, and the plane of reference may turn to include or exclude blue and yellow, but their antonymic signification always lies in their reverse direction.

Often these linear concept spaces are reified, as health, or time, or altitude, but they may also be generated on demand, as in the case of the red-green opposition above. The line of opposition is a subspace of the reified concept space of color. Colors might be opposed on perceptual grounds, or on aethetic-emotional grounds.

Emotional antonyms help to elucidate the structural relationships between emotions. Intensity is a characteristic of emotions. Emotion and color are often analogized, perhaps because of shared structure. Intensity of color and intensity of emotion are immediately identifiable. Anger and hatred correlate, tranquility and love correlate, but tranquility is not generally interpreted as admitting intensity, while love, anger, hatred, all do. It would be interesting to attempt to create a color sphere for emotional categories, but I think it would require more than three dimensions and hence be difficult to visualize, and only useful in an algebraic framework. The vocabulary of emotions includes particulars, the reified concepts of emotional states, and properties, the reified concepts of emotional categories. The same term might be used as a state or as a property of states, and the grammatical categories can confuse the signification, by using a particular as an adjective or verb, or using a property as a noun.

Rise/fall,ascend/descend,go-up/come-down are associated by form and derivation to form pair affinities, a structural property necessary to antonymy, but not to exclusivity.

It would be pleasant to continue in this vein, to form a more complete theory, but time is fleeting.