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Opposite (semantics)

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.

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

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]


An example of an incompatible pair of words is cat : dog:


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]


Cruse (2004) identifies some basic characteristics of opposites:


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:

(to prohibit, issue injunction; to order, command)

enjoin

(moving quickly; fixed firmly in place)

fast

(to split; to adhere)

cleave

(punishment, prohibition; permission)

sanction

(remain in a specific place, postpone; guide direction, movement)

stay

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

-onym

Antithesis

Litotes

Property (philosophy)

Semantic differential

Thesaurus

Aarts, Bas; Chalker, Sylvia; Weiner, Edmund (2014), , Oxford University Press, p. 80, ISBN 978-0-19-965823-7

The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar

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). . 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.

Antonymy revisited: Some thoughts on the relationship between words and concepts

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