Opposite (semantics)

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In lexical semantics, opposites are words lying in an inherently incompatible binary relationship. For example, something that is male entails that it is not female. 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

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.

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:

Types of antonyms

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

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

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

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

An

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

See also

Notes

  1. 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

  • 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.
  • Gambino, Stephen. The Subject Of Opposite. 33 types of Opposites. ( ISBN: 979-8-8715-3854-8 )
  • 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
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