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Opposite (semantics)

In lexical semantics, opposites are words lying in an inherently incompatible binary relationship. 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) is commonly taken to be synonymous with opposite, but antonym also has other more restricted meanings. Graded (or gradable) antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite and which lie on a continuous spectrum (hot, cold). Complementary antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite but whose meanings do not lie on a continuous spectrum (push, pull). Relational antonyms are word pairs where opposite makes sense only in the context of the relationship between the two meanings (teacher, pupil). These more restricted meanings may not apply in all scholarly contexts, with Lyons (1968, 1977) defining antonym to mean gradable antonyms, and Crystal (2003) warning that antonymy and antonym should be regarded with care.

General discussion edit

Opposition is a semantic relation in which one word has a sense or meaning that negates or is, in the sense of scale, distant from a related word. Other words are capable of being opposed, but the language in question has an accidental gap in its 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. Conversely, some words appear to be a prefixed form of an opposite, but the opposite term does not exist, such as inept, which appears to be in- + *ept; such a word is known as an unpaired word.

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, the occurrence of opposites as a lexical pair
  • inherentness, whether the relationship may be presumed implicitly
  • patency, the quality of how obvious a pair is

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").

Some classes of opposites include:

  • antipodals, pairs of words which describe opposite ends of some axis, either literal (such as "left" and "right", "up" and "down", "east" and "west") or figurative or abstract (such as "first" and "last", "beginning" and "end", "entry" and "exit")
  • disjoint opposites (or "incompatibles"), members of a set which are mutually exclusive but which leave a lexical gap unfilled, such as "red" and "blue", "one" and "ten", or "Monday" and "Friday".
  • reversives, pairs of verbs which denote opposing processes, in which one is the reverse of the other. They are (or may be) performed by the same or similar subject(s) without requiring an object of the verbs, such as "rise" and "fall", "accelerate" and "decelerate", or "shrink" and "grow".
  • converses (or relational opposites or relational antonyms), 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.
  • overlapping antonyms, a pair of comparatives in which one, but not the other, implies the positive:
    • An example is "better" and "worse". The sentence "x is better than y" does not imply that x is good, but "x is worse than y" implies that x is bad. Other examples are "faster" and "slower" ("fast" is implied but not "slow") and "dirtier" and "cleaner" ("dirty" is implied but not "clean"). The relationship between overlapping antonyms is often not inherent, but arises from the way they are interpreted most generally in a language. There is no inherent reason that an item be presumed to be bad when it is compared to another as being worse (it could be "less good"), but English speakers have combined the meaning semantically to it over the development of the language.

Types of antonyms edit

An antonym is one of a pair of words with opposite meanings. Each word in the pair is the antithesis of the other. A word may have more than one antonym. There are three categories of antonyms identified by the nature of the relationship between the opposed meanings.

Gradable antonyms edit

A gradable antonym is one of a pair of words with opposite meanings where the two meanings lie on a continuous spectrum. Temperature is such a continuous spectrum so hot and cold, two meanings on opposite ends of the spectrum, are gradable antonyms. Other examples include: heavy : light, fat : skinny, dark : light, young : old, early : late, empty : full, dull : interesting.

Complementary antonyms edit

A complementary antonym, sometimes called a binary or contradictory antonym (Aarts, Chalker & Weiner 2014), is one of a pair of words with opposite meanings, where the two meanings do not lie on a continuous spectrum. There is no continuous spectrum between odd and even but they are opposite in meaning and are therefore complementary antonyms. Other examples include: mortal : immortal, exit : entrance, exhale : inhale, occupied : vacant.

Relational antonyms edit

A relational antonym is one of a pair of words that refer to a relationship from opposite points of view. There is no lexical opposite of teacher, but teacher and pupil are opposite within the context of their relationship. This makes them relational antonyms. Other examples include: husband : wife, doctor : patient, predator : prey, teach : learn, servant : master, come : go, parent : child.

Auto-antonyms edit

An auto-antonym is a word that can have opposite meanings in different contexts or under separate definitions:

  • enjoin (to prohibit, issue injunction; to order, command)
  • fast (moving quickly; fixed firmly in place)
  • cleave (to split; to adhere)
  • sanction (punishment, prohibition; permission)
  • stay (remain in a specific place, postpone; guide direction, movement)

See also edit

Notes edit

  1. ^ Incompatibility can be compared to exclusive disjunction in logic.
  2. ^ 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 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.
  3. ^ 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.
  4. ^ It is assumed here that it has the same referent.
  5. ^ 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.

Bibliography edit

  • Aarts, Bas; Chalker, Sylvia; Weiner, Edmund (2014), The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar, Oxford University Press, p. 80, ISBN 978-0-19-965823-7
  • 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.
  • Davies, M. (2013) Oppositions and Ideology in News Discourse. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
  • 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

opposite, semantics, lexical, semantics, opposites, words, lying, inherently, incompatible, binary, relationship, example, something, that, long, entails, that, short, referred, binary, relationship, because, there, members, opposites, relationship, between, o. In lexical semantics opposites are words lying in an inherently incompatible binary relationship 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 is commonly taken to be synonymous with opposite but antonym also has other more restricted meanings Graded or gradable antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite and which lie on a continuous spectrum hot cold Complementary antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite but whose meanings do not lie on a continuous spectrum push pull Relational antonyms are word pairs where opposite makes sense only in the context of the relationship between the two meanings teacher pupil These more restricted meanings may not apply in all scholarly contexts with Lyons 1968 1977 defining antonym to mean gradable antonyms and Crystal 2003 warning that antonymy and antonym should be regarded with care Contents 1 General discussion 2 Types of antonyms 2 1 Gradable antonyms 2 2 Complementary antonyms 2 3 Relational antonyms 3 Auto antonyms 4 See also 5 Notes 6 BibliographyGeneral discussion editOpposition is a semantic relation in which one word has a sense or meaning that negates or is in the sense of scale distant from a related word Other words are capable of being opposed but the language in question has an accidental gap in its 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 Conversely some words appear to be a prefixed form of an opposite but the opposite term does not exist such as inept which appears to be in ept such a word is known as an unpaired word 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 movingCruse 2004 identifies some basic characteristics of opposites binarity the occurrence of opposites as a lexical pair inherentness whether the relationship may be presumed implicitly patency the quality of how obvious a pair isSome 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 Some classes of opposites include antipodals pairs of words which describe opposite ends of some axis either literal such as left and right up and down east and west or figurative or abstract such as first and last beginning and end entry and exit disjoint opposites or incompatibles members of a set which are mutually exclusive but which leave a lexical gap unfilled such as red and blue one and ten or Monday and Friday reversives pairs of verbs which denote opposing processes in which one is the reverse of the other They are or may be performed by the same or similar subject s without requiring an object of the verbs such as rise and fall accelerate and decelerate or shrink and grow converses or relational opposites or relational antonyms 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 overlapping antonyms a pair of comparatives in which one but not the other implies the positive An example is better and worse The sentence x is better than y does not imply that x is good but x is worse than y implies that x is bad Other examples are faster and slower fast is implied but not slow and dirtier and cleaner dirty is implied but not clean The relationship between overlapping antonyms is often not inherent but arises from the way they are interpreted most generally in a language There is no inherent reason that an item be presumed to be bad when it is compared to another as being worse it could be less good but English speakers have combined the meaning semantically to it over the development of the language Types of antonyms editAn antonym is one of a pair of words with opposite meanings Each word in the pair is the antithesis of the other A word may have more than one antonym There are three categories of antonyms identified by the nature of the relationship between the opposed meanings Gradable antonyms edit A gradable antonym is one of a pair of words with opposite meanings where the two meanings lie on a continuous spectrum Temperature is such a continuous spectrum so hot and cold two meanings on opposite ends of the spectrum are gradable antonyms Other examples include heavy light fat skinny dark light young old early late empty full dull interesting Complementary antonyms edit A complementary antonym sometimes called a binary or contradictory antonym Aarts Chalker amp Weiner 2014 is one of a pair of words with opposite meanings where the two meanings do not lie on a continuous spectrum There is no continuous spectrum between odd and even but they are opposite in meaning and are therefore complementary antonyms Other examples include mortal immortal exit entrance exhale inhale occupied vacant Relational antonyms edit A relational antonym is one of a pair of words that refer to a relationship from opposite points of view There is no lexical opposite of teacher but teacher and pupil are opposite within the context of their relationship This makes them relational antonyms Other examples include husband wife doctor patient predator prey teach learn servant master come go parent child Auto antonyms editAn auto antonym is a word that can have opposite meanings in different contexts or under separate definitions enjoin to prohibit issue injunction to order command fast moving quickly fixed firmly in place cleave to split to adhere sanction punishment prohibition permission stay remain in a specific place postpone guide direction movement See also edit onym Antithesis Litotes Property philosophy Semantic differential ThesaurusNotes edit 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 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 Bibliography editAarts Bas Chalker Sylvia Weiner Edmund 2014 The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar Oxford University Press p 80 ISBN 978 0 19 965823 7 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 amp 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 amp P R Lutzeier Eds Lexikologie Ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wortern und Wortschatzen 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 amp 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 Davies M 2013 Oppositions and Ideology in News Discourse London Bloomsbury Academic 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 amp P R Lutzeier Eds Lexikologie Ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wortern und Wortschatzen Lexicology An international handbook on the nature and structure of words and vocabularies Vol 1 pp 498 507 Berlin De Gruyter Lehrer Adrienne J amp 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 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Opposite semantics amp oldid 1194564764, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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