Antonymy

A Corpus-Based Perspective

Steven Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134502912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Antonymy is the technical name used to describe 'opposites', pairs of words such as rich/poor, love/hate and male/female. Antonyms are a ubiquitous part of everyday language, and this book provides a detailed, comprehensive account of the phenomenon.
This book demonstrates how traditional linguistic theory can be revisited, updated and challenged in the corpus age. It will be essential reading for scholars interested in antonymy and corpus linguistics.

1 The ‘unique fascination’ of antonymy

The title of this chapter is borrowed from an expression used by Cruse (1986: 197) when describing what makes antonymy special. Though often grouped together with synonymy, hyponymy and meronymy, the scope of antonymy is much greater than that of its fellow sense relations. For proof of this, talk to my four-year-old nephew, Thomas. He understands the concept of ‘opposites’ and excitedly tells me all about pairs such as big/little, boy/girl and happy/sad. Together with other childhood learning exercises (such as counting, reciting nursery rhymes and distinguishing between colours), recognising antonyms seems to be a natural stage in an infant’s linguistic development. This is not something which could be said of other sense relations. Furthermore, our exposure to antonyms is not restricted to childhood; we are surrounded by ‘opposites’ throughout our adult life and encounter them on a daily basis.¹ This book will begin by examining the prominence of antonymy in contemporary society and discuss why it seems to have transcended its role as a mere sense relation.

‘Opposites’ or ‘antonyms’?

Though Thomas can happily recall an almost endless list of ‘opposites’,² he is not familiar with the term ‘antonymy’. Often, ‘antonymy’ is thought of as being the correct linguistic term for ‘opposites’, as ‘parentheses’ is simply a technical name for ‘brackets’. However, this is not entirely true. Some linguists, such as Lyons (1977) and Cruse (1986), apply the label of ‘antonymy’ to pairs such as heavy/light, new/old and fast/slow, but do not accept that pairs such as alive/dead, false/true and female/male are antonymous.³ This creates a problem as both sets of pairs would be readily identified as ‘opposites’ by any native speaker of English. I propose to resolve this problem by using the term ‘antonymy’ in its broader sense, referring to any pair of words which could be intuitively recognised as ‘opposites’.

This semantic tension between ‘antonyms’ and ‘opposites’ may partly account for the tendency of commentators to shy away from recognising the status held by the phenomenon in language. For example, Lyons is wary of the word ‘antonymy’ because it is ‘hardly more precise in the usage of most authors than the word oppositeness which it replaces’ (1977: 270) and Simpson is equally cautious about what he refers to as a ‘catch-all category’ (1997: 72). But this instinct to reject a general term needs to be examined. Whilst it is true that antonymy encompasses a multitude of relationships, each slightly different from the next, it is equally true that all established ‘opposites’ in English share something in common. Any native speaker would immediately identify the ‘opposite’ of words such as cold, legal and above without feeling the need to distinguish between gradable antonymy, complementarity and converseness. To deny the status of antonymy to any familiar pair of ‘opposites’ seems counter-intuitive and likely to obscure the underlying uniformity of all such word pairs.

Why study antonymy?

The simple, though somewhat clichéd, answer to the question of why antonymy should be studied is ‘because it’s there’. Indeed, I would suggest that antonymy is much more ‘there’ than many other linguistic phenomena which have received considerably more attention in recent times. It is the ‘most readily apprehended’ (Cruse 1986: 197) of sense relations and many examples of antonymy become deeply ingrained in our mental lexicon from infancy. ‘Opposites’ are quickly learnt and rarely forgotten. Furthermore, it has even been suggested that antonymy has a magical quality, as Cruse explains:

Opposites possess a unique fascination, and exhibit properties which may appear paradoxical. Take, for instance, the simultaneous closeness, and distance from one another, of opposites. The meanings of a pair of opposites are felt intuitively to be maximally separated. Indeed, there is a widespread idea that the power of uniting or reconciling opposites is a magical one, an attribute of the Deity, or a property of states of mind brought about by profound meditation, and so on . . . Philosophers and others from Heraclitus to Jung have noted the tendency of things to slip into their opposite states; and many have remarked on the thin dividing line between love and hate, genius and madness, etc.

(Cruse 1986: 197)

Cruse’s observations echo earlier rhetoric about the significance of antonymy. For instance, despite rejecting ‘antonymy’ as a useful label, Lyons, notes ‘a general human tendency to categorize experience in terms of dichotomous contrast’ (1977: 277). Such claims are difficult to substantiate but will now be examined in relation to a number of fields in which antonymy has been said (or can be said) to play an important role: first, research into the acquisition of language in children will be considered to determine why antonyms are memorised in infancy; second, the psychological domain of word association testing will be explored to determine whether the human mind can be said to The ‘unique fascination’ of antonymy 3 operate in terms of oppositions; third, the role of antonymy in literature will be analysed to speculate why ‘opposites’ often feature heavily in dramatic or memorable prose; and fourth, metaphor will be examined with a view to illustrating the extensive role served by antonymy in figurative speech. Collectively, the analyses of these four discrete areas may help to illuminate the extent to which antonymy can be seen as a fundamental experience-organising mechanism.

Language acquisition

It has been widely documented that children tend to grasp the concept of oppositeness at a very early age, often learning antonyms in pairs rather than as single items. For example, Kagan notes that ‘soon after learning the meaning of up, the child learns the meaning of down; after learning the meaning of high, she learns low; after good, she develops the meaning of bad ’ (1984: 187). This could reflect the tendency to dichotomise which Lyons notes; alternatively, it could simply be a learning strategy used by children as part of their general language acquisition mechanism. It seems efficient to learn closely related words in tandem, yet it is difficult to think of other word pairs which are learnt in the same fashion as antonyms. One would not necessarily feel a similar urge to learn synonyms in unison, nor would one find it problematic to fully understand a superordinate term without first being taught all of its corresponding hyponyms. However, in each of Kagan’s examples, it is difficult to conceptualise one antonym without first having some notion of the other. Can one fully comprehend the meaning of up, high and good without having any concept of down, low and bad?

Conducting research into second language acquisition, Miller and Fell-baum note that ‘when given only one member of an antonymous or opposed verb pair, [students of a foreign language] will insist on being taught the other member’; likewise, when referring to native language competence, Egan states that ‘it is good, we feel, to know the exact antonym of a word, for not only will it give us a firmer grasp of the meaning of the word to which it is opposed, but inversely, of itself ’ (both cited by Muehleisen, 1997: 4). These observations suggest that adults favour antonymy as strongly as children – we are drawn to ‘opposites’ when learning a new language and feel more comfortable with the precise meaning of a word in our native tongue if we are familiar with its corresponding antonym.

Whether this gives antonymy a ‘unique fascination’ is difficult to judge. Indeed, the integral position held by antonymy in the mental lexicon is something of a chicken-and-egg situation. It is almost impossible to know whether language simply reflects existing oppositions in the outside world or whether we, as humans, are subconsciously predisposed to impose such dichotomies. Whatever the cause, the consequence is that ‘opposites’ hold a key place in language and this is reflected by the pull of antonymy to learners of a first or other language.

Associationism

Another field in which antonymy has been identified as playing a significant role is that of word association testing. For example, Clark (1970) examined the tendency shown by informants to provide the antonym of a stimulus word when asked to ‘say the first thing that comes into your head’. He concluded that:

If a stimulus has a common ‘opposite’ (an antonym), it will always elicit that opposite more often than anything else. These responses are the most frequent found anywhere in word association.

(Clark 1970: 275)

Clark’s conclusions follow those of Deese (1964), who found forty words all of which elicited their antonym most commonly.⁴ Indeed, it is difficult to dispute the fact that people often think in terms of oppositions when faced with a word association test. However, data shows that such tests also elicit synonyms and general collocates (Clark 1970: 281–2); antonymy is only one of many relationships reflected by informants. Indeed, the results of word association tests, though often cited as being indicative of the central role of antonymy in the mental lexicon, are not particularly convincing. Such is the artificiality of the procedure, I suspect that responses may disclose no more about cognitive practices than they allegedly do about an informant’s sexual hang-ups (Jung 1973: 288–317).

Furthermore, this research should be examined within the context of the dominant linguistic schools of the day. Clark is puzzled by his findings because ‘language, the critics say, should not be thought of as a consequence of built-up associations’ (1970: 272). The ‘critics’ referred to here would include Chomsky (1965) and other proponents of transformational grammar theories. However, many contemporary linguists would be much more receptive to seeing language exactly as here described (and dismissed) – as a series of ‘built-up associations’. Therefore, though Clark’s findings remain of interest, their repercussions are perhaps less significant now than they were in the mid-1960s.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Clark’s work is the phrase he coins to describe antonym elicitation: ‘the minimum contrast rule’ (1970: 275). Intuitively, one might not feel that antonyms reflect ‘minimum contrast’. Indeed, one might be more inclined to think of antonyms as having maximum contrast. Yet Clark’s thinking is quite revealing – the contrast, he believes, is minimum because antonyms only differ in one respect. For example, girl elicits boy because they are both human and both non-adult. They only differ against one scale, namely the scale of gender. This thinking, which closely resembles what would later be termed componential analysis (Leech 1974: 89), sheds light on Cruse’s remark about ‘the simultaneous closeness, and distance from one another, of opposites’ (1986: 197). Cruse does not refer to the minimum contrast rule directly, but is clearly describing the same phenomenon as Clark when he writes:

This paradox of simultaneous difference and similarity is partly resolved by the fact that opposites typically differ along only one dimension of meaning: in respect of all other features they are identical, hence their semantic closeness; along the dimension of difference, they occupy opposing poles, hence the feeling of difference.

(Cruse 1986: 197)

The idea that a pair of antonyms are semantically alike may initially seem counter-intuitive, but it is difficult to fault Cruse’s logic. On the semantic scale along which they operate, antonyms are some distance apart; however, in many other respects (word class, paradigmatic interchangeability, collo-cational profile, etc.) antonyms are remarkably similar.

Literature

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

(Charles Dickens, A Tale Of Two Cities)

The opening few lines of A Tale Of Two Cities are among the most familiar ever written by Charles Dickens. They are also replete with antonyms. In total, nine contrasts are presented in the text above, most of which are established antonymous pairs. The sentence (for the above is all a single orthographic sentence) features no coordinators to link its clauses, but rather relies on apposition. The effect of the antonymy is to describe a period of confusion, contradiction and extremity. The text has an encompassing quality; the repetition of antonymous pair after antonymous pair evokes a feeling of being told much about the time, yet being told nothing because each new clause is effectively cancelled out by the next. One could interpret the passage as a dialogue which reflects two conflicting opinions about the period, or one could attribute the narrative to a single voice. Either way, given the magnitude of Dickens’s work, it is curious that these lines are perhaps the best known of all. Curious, and possibly reflective of ‘the unique fascination’ (Cruse 1986: 197) of antonymy.

Another example of a memorable and important piece of literature making extensive use of antonymy can be found at the beginning of the Bible:

And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night’. And there was evening, and there was morning – the first day.

(Genesis 1: 4–5)

The passage above is part of a series of dichotomous distinctions made ...