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"buy" and "sell" that are basically the same action/event, but reverse arguments (subject of one, the object of the other):
Is there a any special name for verb pairs? How many verb-pairs exist in English exist? (is it like <5 or one can come up with mechanism/algorithm to generate many more pairs?)
I'm not aware of a special name/class for them. Yet I can imagine some pairs:
It's hard to think about a class for this. At first I thought about some kind of antonyms (buy is antonym of sell, loan is antonym of borrow). But I can't apply it to my whole list, so it's not right.
It's like... The second verb in the pair is like a new word for the passive form of the first verb, something like this. Hard to define.
These are usually called 'converses' or 'relational antonyms'. There are more than five, actually there are quite a few because not only verbs, but also nouns and other parts of speech can be converses, e.g., "father-son", etc. (you can find a NON-EXHAUSTIVE list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converse_(semantics)). It is unlikely that you could come up with an algorithm to generate "many more pairs", since these pairs are lexicalized and you cannot create them at will: there isn't a productive morphological mechanism to create converses in English. (Except in technical uses by linguists: -er/-ee as in "kisser-kissee", etc.)
It would be an issue of valency of the verbs. In such pairs, the valency is inverted, regarding subject/indirect object. In other pairs, the inversion is regarding subject/direct object (such as in I like you = You please me). I am sure that there are pairs where the inversion relates to direct/indirect objects too, but I can't think of an example just now.
I am not sure there are technical names for these oppositions - you might coin them, perhaps.
