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Opposite (semantics)

In lexical semantics, '''opposites''' are words that lie in an inherently incompatible binary relationship as in the opposite pairs ''male : female'', ''long : short'', ''up : down'', and ''precede : follow''. The notion of incompatibility here refers to fact that one word in an opposite pair entails that it is not the other pair member. 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''') has also been commonly used as a term that is synonymous with ''opposite''; however, the term also has other more restricted meanings. One usage has ''antonym'' referring to both gradable opposites, such as ''long : short'', and (non-gradable) complementary opposites, such as ''male : female'', while opposites of the types ''up : down'' and ''precede : follow'' are excluded from the definition. A third usage (particularly that of the influential Lyons 1968, 1977) defines the term ''antonym'' as referring to only gradable opposites (the ''long : short'' type) while the other types are referred to with different terms. Therefore, as Crystal (2003) warns, the terms ''antonymy'' and ''antonym'' should be regarded with care. In this article, the usage of Lyons (1963, 1977) and Cruse (1986, 2004) will be followed where ''antonym'' is restricted to gradable opposites and ''opposite'' is used as the general term referring to any of the subtypes discussed below.

General discussion

Opposites are interestingly simultaneously different and similar in meaning. Typically, they differ in only one dimension of meaning, but are similar in most other respects, including similarity in grammar and positions of semantic abnormality. Additionally, not all words have an opposite. Some words are non-opposable. For example, the word ''platypus'' has no word that stands in opposition to it (hence, the unanswerability of ''What is the opposite of platypus?''). The main reason is that animal or plant species have no binary opposites (other than possible gender opposites such as lion/lioness, etc.). Other words are opposable but have an accidental gap in a given language's 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 may be viewed as a special type of incompatibility.Incompatibility can be compared to exclusive disjunction in logic. 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):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 at midnight''.
- '''contrariety''': ''It's a shoe'' unilaterally entails ''It's not a person''. (But, ''It's not a person'' does not entail ''It's a shoe'' since ''it'' could be a dog or something else.) ''It's a shoe'' and ''It's a person'' are said to be in a contrary relation.
- '''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.
- sentence ''A is X '' entails sentence ''A is not Y '' 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. An example of an incompatible pair of words is ''cat : dog'':
- ''It's a cat'' entails ''It's not a dog'' It is assumed here that ''it'' has the same referent. 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'' 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.
- ''It's stationary'' entails ''It's not moving'' Cruse (2004) identifies some basic characteristics of opposites:
- binarity
- inheritness
- patency

Subtypes

Complementaries

Complementary opposites are pairs that express absolute opposites, like ''mortal'' and ''immortal''.
- ''interactives''
- ''satisfactives''
- ''counteractives''

Antonyms (gradable opposites)

Antonyms, from the Greek language|Greek ''anti'' ("opposite") and ''onoma'' ("name") are word pairs that are opposite in Meaning (linguistic)|meaning, such as ''hot'' and ''cold'', ''fat'' and ''skinny'', and ''up'' and ''down''. Words may have different antonyms, depending on the meaning. Both ''long'' and ''tall'' are antonyms of ''short''. Antonyms are of four types:
- '''Gradable antonyms''' are two ends of the spectrum (''slow'' and ''fast'') but can have variations. Though the word ''antonym'' was only coined by philology|philologists in the 19th century, such relationships are a fundamental part of a language, in contrast to synonyms, which are a result of history and drawing of fine distinctions, or homonyms, which are mostly etymology|etymological accidents or coincidences. Languages often have ways of creating antonyms as an easy extension of lexicon. An example is the English prefixes ''in-'' and ''un-''.Unreal is the antonym of ''real'' and ''indocile'' is of ''docile''. Some planned languages abundantly use such devices to reduce vocabulary multiplication. Esperanto vocabulary#Affixes|Esperanto has ''mal-'' (compare ''bona'' = "good" and ''malbona'' = "bad"), Damin has ''kuri-'' (''tjitjuu'' "small", ''kuritjitjuu'' "large") and Newspeak has ''un-'' (as in ''ungood'', "bad").

Directional opposites

- ''antipodals''
- ''reversives''
- ''converses'' (or ''relational opposites'')
- ''pseudo-opposites''
- '''Relational antonyms''' ('''Converses''') are 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''.

Auto-antonyms

- '''Auto-antonyms''' are the same words that can mean the opposite of themselves under different contexts or having separate definitions
    - enjoin (to prohibit, issue injunction; to General order|order, command)
    - wiktionary : fast#adjective |fast (moving quickly; fixed wiktionary : firmly|firmly in place)
    - wiktionary : cleave|cleave (to wiktionary : split|split; to wiktionary : adhere|adhere)
    - wiktionary : sanction|sanction (punishment, prohibition ; permission)
    - wiktionary:stay|stay (wiktionary : remain|remain in a specific place, postpone; wiktionary : guide|guide direction, movement)

Notes

Bibliography

- 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.
- 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 Publishing.