From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In lexical semantics,
opposites are words that lie in an inherently
incompatible binary relationship as in the opposite pairs
male : female, long : short,
up : down, and precede : follow. The
notion of incompatibility here refers to fact that one word in an
opposite pair entails that it is not the other pair
member. For example, something that is long entails that
it is not short. It is referred to as a 'binary'
relationship because there are two members in a set of opposites.
The relationship between opposites is known as
opposition. A member of a pair of opposites can
generally be determined by the question What is the opposite of
X ?
The term antonym (and the related
antonymy) has also been commonly used as a term
that is synonymous with opposite; however, the term also
has other more restricted meanings. One usage has antonym
referring to both gradable opposites, such as long :
short, and (non-gradable) complementary opposites, such as
male : female, while opposites of the types
up : down and precede : follow are
excluded from the definition. A third usage (particularly that of
the influential Lyons 1968, 1977) defines the term antonym
as referring to only gradable opposites (the long :
short type) while the other types are referred to with
different terms. Therefore, as Crystal (2003) warns, the terms
antonymy and antonym should be regarded with
care. In this article, the usage of Lyons (1963, 1977) and Cruse
(1986, 2004) will be followed where antonym is restricted
to gradable opposites and opposite is used as the general
term referring to any of the subtypes discussed below.
General
discussion
Opposites are, interestingly, simultaneously different and
similar in meaning. Typically, they differ in only one dimension of
meaning, but are similar in most other respects, including
similarity in grammar and positions of semantic abnormality.
Additionally, not all words have an opposite. Some words are
non-opposable. For example, animal or plant species have no binary
opposites (other than possible gender opposites such as
lion/lioness, etc.); the word platypus therefore has no
word that stands in opposition to it (hence the unanswerability of
What is the opposite of platypus?). Other words are
opposable but have an accidental gap in a given language's lexicon. For example, the word
devout lacks a lexical opposite, but it is fairly easy to
conceptualize a parameter of devoutness where devout lies
at the positive pole with a missing member at the negative pole.
Opposites of such words can nevertheless sometimes be formed with
the prefixes un- or non-, with varying degrees of
naturalness. For example, the word undevout appears in
Webster's dictionary of 1828, while the pattern of
non-person could conceivably be extended to
non-platypus.
Opposites may be viewed as a special type of
incompatibility.[1] Words
that are incompatible create the following type of entailment (where
X is a given word and Y is a different word
incompatible with word X):[2]
- sentence A is X entails
sentence A is not Y [3]
An example of an incompatible pair of words is cat :
dog:
- It's a cat entails It's not
a dog [4]
This incompatibility is also found in the opposite pairs
fast : slow and stationary : moving, as
can be seen below:
- It's fast entails It's not
slow [5]
- It's stationary entails It's
not moving
Cruse (2004) identifies some basic characteristics of
opposites:
- binarity
- inheritness
- patency
Subtypes
Complementaries
Complementary opposites are pairs that express absolute
opposites, like mortal and immortal.
- interactives
- satisfactives
- counteractives
Antonyms (gradable
opposites)
For the purposes of this article (see introduction),
antonyms, from the Greek anti ("opposite") and onoma ("name")
are gradable opposites. Gradable opposites lie at opposite ends of
a continuous spectrum of meanings; examples are hot and
cold, slow and fast, and fat
and skinny. Words may have several different antonyms,
depending on the meaning: both long and tall can
be antonyms of short.
Though the word antonym was only coined by philologists in the 19th
century, such relationships are a fundamental part of a language,
in contrast to synonyms,
which are a result of history and drawing of fine distinctions, or
homonyms, which are mostly
etymological accidents
or coincidences.
Languages often have ways of creating antonyms as an easy
extension of lexicon. For example, English has the prefixes
in- and un-, so unreal is the antonym of
real and indocile is of docile.
Some planned languages abundantly use such devices to reduce
vocabulary multiplication. Esperanto has mal-
(compare bona = "good" and malbona = "bad"), Damin has kuri-
(tjitjuu "small", kuritjitjuu "large") and Newspeak has un- (as
in ungood, "bad").
Directional opposites
- antipodals
- reversives
- converses (or relational opposites)
- pseudo-opposites
- Relational antonyms
(Converses) are pairs in which one describes a
relationship between two objects and the other describes the same
relationship when the two objects are reversed, such as
parent and child, teacher and
student, or buy and sell.
Auto-antonyms
An auto-antonym is a word that can
have opposite meanings in different contexts or under separate
definitions:
Notes
- ^
Incompatibility can be compared to exclusive
disjunction in logic.
- ^
There are four types of entailment useful to lexical semantics:
- unilateral entailment: It's a fish
unilaterally entails It's an animal. (It is unilateral,
i.e. one-directional, because It's an animal does not
entail It's a fish since it could be a dog or a
cat or some other animal.)
- logical equivalence (or
multilateral entailment): The party commenced at midnight
entails The party began at midnight AND The party
began at midnight also entails The party commenced at
midnight.
- contrariety: The sentences 'X is blue all
over' and 'X is red all over' are contraries since both cannot be
simultaneously true. On the Aristotelian square of opposition, the
A and E type propositions ('All As are Bs' and 'No As are Bs',
respectively) are contraries of each other. Propositions that
cannot be simultaneously false (e.g. 'Something is red' and
'Something is not red') are said to be
subcontraries.
- contradiction: It's dead entails
It's not alive AND It's not alive entails
It's dead AND It's alive entails It's not
dead AND It's not dead entails It's alive.
It's dead and It's alive are said to be in a
contradictory relation.
- ^
Stated differently, if the proposition expressed by the sentence
A is X is TRUE, then the
proposition expressed by the sentence A is not
Y is also TRUE.
- ^
It is assumed here that it has the same referent.
- ^
It is also assumed here the reference point of comparison for these
adjectives remains the same in both sentences. For example, a
rabbit might be fast compared to turtle but slow compared to a
sport car. It is essential when determining the relationships
between the lexical meaning of words to keep the situational
context identical.
See also
Bibliography
- Crystal, David. (2003). A dictionary of linguistics and
phonetics (5th ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
- Cruse, D. Alan. (1986). Lexical semantics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
- Cruse, D. Alan. (1992). Antonymy revisited: Some thoughts on
the relationship between words and concepts. In A. J. Lehrer &
E. F. Kittay (Eds.), Frames, fields, and contrasts: New essays
in semantic and lexical organization (pp. 289-306). Hillsdale,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- Cruse, D. Alan. (2002). Paradigmatic relations of exclusion and
opposition II: Reversivity. In D. A. Cruse, F. Hundsnurscher, M.
Job, & P.-R. Lutzeier (Eds.), Lexikologie: Ein
internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wörtern und
Wortschätzen: Lexicology: An international handbook on the nature
and structure of words and vocabularies (Vol. 1, pp. 507-510).
Berlin: De Gruyter.
- Cruse, D. Alan. (2004). Meaning in language: An
introduction to semantics and pragmatics (2nd ed.). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
- Cruse, D. Alan; & Togia, Pagona. (1995). Towards a
cognitive model of antonymy. Journal of Lexicology
1, 113-141.
- Davies, M. (2007) ‘The Attraction of Opposites: The ideological
function of conventional and created oppositions in the
construction of in-groups and out-groups in news texts’, in
Jeffries, L., McIntyre, D. and Bousfield, D. (eds) Stylistics
and Social Cognition, pp. 79-100.
- Jeffries, L. (2009, forthcoming) Opposition in Discourse:
The Construction of Oppositional Meaning London:
Continuum.
- Jones, S. (2002), Antonymy: A Corpus-based perspective
London and New York: Routledge.
- Lehrer, Adrienne J. (1985). Markedness and antonymy.
Journal of Linguistics, 21, 397-421.
- Lehrer, Adrienne J. (2002). Paradigmatic relations of exclusion
and opposition I: Gradable antonymy and complementarity. In D. A.
Cruse, F. Hundsnurscher, M. Job, & P.-R. Lutzeier (Eds.),
Lexikologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und
Struktur von Wörtern und Wortschätzen: Lexicology: An international
handbook on the nature and structure of words and vocabularies
(Vol. 1, pp. 498-507). Berlin: De Gruyter.
- Lehrer, Adrienne J.; & Lehrer, Keith. (1982). Antonymy.
Linguistics and Philosophy, 5, 483-501.
- Lyons, John. (1963). Structural semantics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
- Lyons, John. (1968). Introduction to theoretical
linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Lyons, John. (1977). Semantics (Vol. 1). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
- Mettinger, Arthur. (1994). Aspects of semantic opposition
in English. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Murphy, M. Lynne. (2003). Semantic relations and the
lexicon: Antonymy, synonymy, and other paradigms. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
- Palmer, F. R. (1976). Semantics: A new outline.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Saeed, John I. (2003). Semantics (2nd ed.). Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishing.
External
links
Wikis
Search
