Antonymy

Speakers of English can readily agree that words like good-bad, love-hate and in-out are opposites or antonyms. The notion of oppositeness involved here seems to cover several different types of relation; in general, however, antonymy may be characterized as a relationship of incompatibility between two terms with respect to some given dimension of contrast. Some words seem to have more than one antonym, depending on the dimension of contrast involved (girl has both boy and woman, depending on whether the dimension of contrast is sex or age; sweet has both bitter and sour: see Murphy 2003: 173).

Not every word has an obvious antonym: library, of, and corresponding are three cases for which there is no obvious relevant dimension of contrast and for which antonyms are consequently hard to identify. And even where an obvious dimension of contrast does exist, antonyms are not always available: angry, for instance, does not have any obvious antonym in English even though we can easily conceive of the scale of arousal and calmness to which it belongs.

QUESTION Name ten other lexical items which do not seem to have obvious antonyms. Can you construct contexts in which antonyms become available?

Nevertheless, antonymy is an important relation within the vocabulary of a language. We discuss in Chapter 3 how Warlpiri specifically exploits antonymy in the special Jiliwirri speech style (3.2.2.1). Another mark of the significance of antonymy is the fact that many languages can create antonyms morphologically. English does this productively with the prefix un-. In Ancient Greek, antonyms were created through the addition of the prefix a(n)-, as in an-eleutheros ‘unfree’ (eleutheros ‘free’), an-omoios ‘unlike’ (omoios ‘like’) and an-artios ‘uneven’ (artios ‘even’).

When discussing antonymy, the principal distinction we have to make is between gradable and non-gradable antonyms. Non-gradable antonyms are antonyms which do not admit a midpoint, such as male-female or pass fail. Assertion of one of these typically entails the denial of the other. Thus, if someone is female, they are necessarily not male, and someone who has failed an exam has necessarily not passed it. Gradable antonyms, however, like hot-cold or good-bad, seem to be more common than non-gradable ones. A gradable pair of antonyms names points on a scale which contains a midpoint: thus, hot and cold are two points towards different ends of a scale which has a midpoint, lexicalized by adjectives like tepid, which is used to refer to the temperature of liquids which are neither hot nor cold, but somewhere in between. A consequence of the fact that grad able antonyms occur on a scale is the fact that they are open to comparison. Thus, we may say that one drink is hotter than another, or that some water is less cold than another.

 QUESTION List fifteen gradable and fifteen non-gradable antonym pairs.

Gradable antonyms have a number of subtle characteristics. For example, one of the members of an adjectival antonym pair often behaves ‘neutrally’ in questions and comparative constructions, in that it simply serves to invoke the dimension of contrast as a whole, without attributing either of the opposed properties to the object it qualifies. In the pair of gradable antonyms good and bad, for instance, good is the neutral or uncommitted member. Thus, (2) and (3) do not imply that the film is actually good (it might just be average, or even bad):

Contrastingly, bad and its comparative worse do commit the speaker to the badness of the film, as shown by B’s denial of this implication in (4), and the oddness of (5)

Not all gradable antonyms show these imbalances, however. Some antonyms, like those in (6), are equipollent, in other words symmetrical in their distribution and interpretation, with neither member of the pair having an uncommitted (‘neutral’) use. Thus, both members of the following pair imply an assertion of the mentioned property:

Uncommitted antonym pairs, which are in the minority in English, typically name objectively measurable qualities like size, age and weight (Lehrer 2002: 498). Very little research has been conducted into committedness cross-linguistically. Cruse (1992) investigated antonyms meaning long-short, good-bad and hot-cold in English, French, Turkish (Altaic, Turkey), Macedonian (Indo-European, Macedonia), Arabic and Chinese. For the adjectives meaning ‘longer’, ‘shorter’ and ‘better’ all languages allow an impartial or uncommitted use, suggesting that antonym behaviour may show some cross-linguistic uniformity. Phenomena like (7), however, suggest that such cross-linguistic findings should be approached with caution. Indeed, one of the main results which cross-linguistic research into antonymy could bring is an appreciation of just how context-dependent committedness is cross-linguistically.

Languages with many adjectives are the most likely to have gradable antonyms. However, languages without adjectives can convey similar contrasts. In Chinese, for example, the same gradable contrasts are represented through static verbs such as gāo ‘be tall’ and hăo ‘be good’ (Murphy 2003: 190). Similarly, the English verbs love-hate show comparable behaviour to many gradable adjectives (Murphy 2003: 190). Thus, they establish points on a scale which admit differing degrees (8a, b), and assertion of one necessitates the denial of the other:

QUESTION Consider the noun pairs hero/coward, genius/dolt, giant/shrimp. Are these gradable antonyms?

 A certain number of words in English which have more than one meaning can be given descriptions which make them seem autoantonymous, i.e. their own opposites (Murphy 2003: 173). Thus, temper means both ‘to harden’ and ‘to soften’; cleave means both ‘stick together’ and ‘force apart’ and sanction means both ‘to approve’ and ‘to censure’. Furthermore, there are many denominal verbs for putting in or taking out things which show similar autoantonymy, (e.g. to string a bean vs. to string a violin, Clark and Clark 1979). Murphy points out (2003: 173) that contextual factors limit the risk of confusion in many of these cases: if you temper your comments you are softening them, not making them harder, whereas tempering metal can only refer to hardening it.

There are many other types of relation which are commonly thought of as exemplifying antonymy. Examples include what Lyons (1977) calls converse opposition, exemplified by relations like parent-child, buy-sell, give-receive, above below; directional opposition such as north-south, and come-go; and reversive opposition like do-undo, colour-bleach, build-demolish. Still other pairs which could be described as antonyms, but do not fall under any of these categories, are nut-bolt and hand-glove (Murphy 2003: 199). Our initial description of antonymy as incompatibility with respect to a given dimension will cover these examples. Thus, a nut and a bolt are complementary tools which do not fulfil the same function and are therefore incompatible (a nut cannot be used instead of a bolt), and hand and glove show similar complementarity: the visible end of an arm is either a (gloveless) hand or a glove.

A general problem with subtypes of antonymy is that of determining their boundaries. Is sell-refund a converse, a reversive, or neither? Cruse (2002b: 507) defines reversives as a class of verb opposites which ‘denote either changes in opposite directions between two terminal states . . . or the causation of such changes’. He notes that ‘a test which permits the delimitation (for English) of a fairly coherent set of reversible verbs (that is, verbs which are potential members of reversive oppositions) is the again-test. This depends on the possibility of using unstressed again without the process denoted by the verb having happened before.’ Thus, the following sentences are taken as evidence that enter and leave are a reversive pair:

QUESTION Which of the following verbs is unstressed again possible with: screw-unscrew, do-undo, colour-bleach, build-demolish, fill-empty, clean dirty, fold-unfold, stand up-sit down, rehearse-perform, plant-harvest? Can you think of any similar tests for conversives and directionals?

 As pointed out by Murphy (2003: 10), the amount of certainty we have in acknowledging a pair of words as antonyms seems to have an important cultural component. Some antonyms, like hot-cold or big-small, seem well established culturally, whereas others, like sweltering-frigid or gigantic-tiny, which seem to convey equally ‘opposite’ notions, have less of an antonymic ring. This leads Murphy to conclude that a speaker’s knowledge of the relation of antonymy (as, in fact, of all lexical relations) is metalexical: the fact that two words are antonyms (synonyms, etc.) is not, in other words, part of our dictionary knowledge of the word’s meaning, but part of our encyclopaedic knowledge about the word’s meaning.

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

سماحة السيد الصافي: عهد الإمام علي (عليه السلام) لمالك الأشتر ضرورة لكل قيادي وإداري في المجتمعات

قسم المعارف: كتاب (الكواكب السماوية) يقدم مادة علمية تخدم الباحثين في مجالات الأدب والعقيدة والبلاغة

قسم الصيانة يجري أعمال الإدامة الدورية لجدران حرم مرقد أبي الفضل العباس (عليه السلام) وصحنه الشريف

قسم الشؤون الفكرية يعلن انضمام الجامعة العراقية لمشروع حفظ النتاج العلمي العراقي

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

السجائر الإلكترونية والإقلاع عن التدخين.. نتائج متباينة تثير الجدل العلمي

مصر تحقق إنجازاً دولياً جديداً في منظمة الصحة العالمية

دراسة: السباحة فعّالة أكثر من الجري في الحفاظ على صحة القلب

عامل خطر في بداية الحمل يؤخر تطور الكلام والمهارات الحركية لدى الرضع

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

أحلامك ليست عشوائية.. إليك ما يفعله دماغك أثناء نومك

روسيا.. العلماء يضاعفون الاستقرار الحراري للألواح الشمسية ثلاث مرات

علماء يكشفون سر سرعة الدلافين في السباحة

سلمي أو دموي.. هكذا تنتقل السلطة في مجتمع الجرذان

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Lexical relations

Semantics and pragmatics

Relevance theory

Are the maxims universal?

Questions about implicatures

Infringing the maxims

Gricean maxims and the Cooperative Principle

Conventional and conversational implicature

Discrepancies between truth-functional meaning and utterance meaning

Interpersonal context: implicature

Interpersonal context: speakers intention and hearers inference

Consequences of the illocutionary perspective