This paper investigates the interpretation of unbounded (scalar) adjective antonyms with and without negation such as (not) narrow -(not) wide and bounded adjective antonyms with and without negation such as (not) dead -(not) alive as well as their interpretations with approximating degree modifiers, fairly and almost, respectively. The investigation was designed to test the boundedness hypothesis, namely that the negator is sensitive to the configuration of the adjective in terms of BOUNDEDNESS. The data are Swedish and the results of the experiments show that negated unbounded adjectives do not evoke the interpretation of their antonyms, i.e. not wide does not equal 'narrow'. The results of the experiments with bounded adjectives with and without negation showed that some of the negated adjectives were interpreted as synonyms of their antonyms, i.e. not alive equals 'dead'. However, this pattern was not consistent across the bounded adjectives, since a number of them readily lent themselves to partial readings. Four types of bounded antonyms emerged from the participants' judgements. For both unbounded and bounded adjectives, the interpretations of the approximating degree modifiers and the adjectives were not significantly different from the negated adjectives. #

Jones (2002) identified several discourse functions of antonymy, each of which is loosely associated with a number of contrastive constructions in written English. Subsequent work (Jones, 2006;Jones and Murphy, 2005;Murphy and Jones, 2008) demonstrated that these functions are found in other modalities/registers of English, albeit with some differences in distribution. This article takes a first step in exploring discourse functions of antonymy in a language other than English. Because binary contrast has the potential to interact in different ways with the values and thought patterns of different cultures, we hypothesized that other languages differ from English in the ways in which antonyms are used in discourse.In this study of antonyms in Swedish, translational near-equivalents of pairs used by Jones were searched in the Swedish Parole corpus, and more than 4300 instances of co-occurring antonyms were found and analyzed in their sentential contexts. While the same range of antonym discourse functions is found in English and Swedish, the proportions of those functions differ significantly between the two languages. This paper both describes their functions (and the form of the functions) in Swedish and reflects on the similarities and differences with English. We ascribe some of the differences to the idiomaticity of certain componential expressions and discuss the possibility that certain cultural values affect some categories. #

The goal of this paper is to combine corpus methodology with experimental methods to gain insights into the nature of antonymy as a lexico-semantic relation and the degree of antonymic canonicity of word pairs in language and in memory. Two approaches to antonymy in language are contrasted, the lexical categorical model and the cognitive prototype model. The results of the investigation support the latter model and show that different pairings have different levels of lexico-semantic affinity. At this general level of categorization, empirical methods converge; however, since they measure slightly different aspect of lexico-semantic opposability and affinity, and since the techniques of investigation are different in nature, we obtain slightly conflicting results at the more specific levels. We conclude that some antonym pairs can be diagnosed as "canonical" on the strength of three indicators: textual co-occurrence, individual judgement about "goodness" of opposition, and elicitation evidence.

This article offers a Cognitive Semantic approach to antonymy in language and thought. Based on a series of recent empirical investigations using different observational techniques, we analyze (i) the nature of the category of antonymy, and (ii) the status of its members in terms of goodness of opposition. Our purpose is to synthesize these empirical investigations and provide a theoretical framework that is capable of accounting for antonymy as a mode of thought in language use and meaning-making. We show that antonymy has conceptual basis, but in contrast to other lexico-semantic construals, a limited number of words seem to have special lexical status as dimensional protagonists. Form–meaning pairings are antonyms when they are used as binary opposites. Configurationally, this translates into a construal where some content is divided by a BOUNDARY. This configuration (or schema) is a necessary requirement for meanings to be used as antonyms and all antonyms have equal status as members. In contrast to categorization by configuration, categorization by contentful meaning structures forms a continuum ranging from strongly related pairings as core members toad hoccouplings on the outskirts. In order to explain why some lexico-semantic couplings tend to form conventionalized pairs, we appeal to their ontological set-up, the symmetry of the antonyms in relation to the boundary between the meaning structures, their contextual range of use and frequency.

This paper seeks to explain why some semantically-opposed word pairs are more likely to be seen as canonical antonyms (for example, cold/hot) than others (icy/scorching, cold/fiery, freezing/hot, etc.). Specifically, it builds on research which has demonstrated that, in discourse, antonyms are inclined to favour certain frames, such as 'X and Y alike', 'from X to Y' and 'either X or Y' (Justeson and Katz, 1991; etc.), and to serve a limited range of discourse functions (Jones, 2002). Our premise is that the more canonical an antonym pair is, the greater the fidelity with which it will occupy such frames. Since an extremely large corpus is needed to identify meaningful patterns of cooccurrence, we turn to Internet data for this research. As well as enabling the notion of antonym canonicity to be revisited from a more empirical perspective, this approach also allows us to evaluate the appropriateness (and assess the risks) of using the World Wide Web as a corpus for studies into certain types of low-frequency textual phenomena.

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The study of antonyms (or 'opposites') in a language can provide important insight into word meaning and discourse structures. This book provides an extensive investigation of antonyms in English and offers an innovative model of how we mentally organize concepts and how we perceive contrasts between them. The authors use corpus and experimental methods to build a theoretical picture of the antonym relation, its status in the mind and its construal in context. Evidence is drawn from natural antonym use in speech and writing, first-language antonym acquisition, and controlled elicitation and judgements of antonym pairs by native speakers. The book also proposes ways in which a greater knowledge of how antonyms work can be applied to the fields of language technology and lexicography.

This study has two goals: First, to give an account of the semantic organization of individually used antonymic adjectives in discourse and second, based on those findings and previous work on antonymic meanings, to contribute to a comprehensive theoretical account of their representation within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The hypothesis is that the members of the pairs are used in the same contexts and in the same type of constructions, not only when they co-occur and are used to express binary opposition as shown in previous studies, but also when they do not. The manually coded corpus data from the BNC are analyzed along four semantic parameters: (i) the configuration of the adjectives in terms of gradability, (ii) the way they modify the nominal meanings, i.e., attributively or predicatively (iii) the meaning type of the modified nouns, and (iv) the status of the constructions with respect to whether their meanings are what we refer to as "basic", metaphorical or metonymical. Correspondence analysis technique is used to identify similarities and differences on the basis of the totality of the data. As predicted, our findings confirm a high degree of pairwise similarity -but also some differences. On the basis of these results, it can be argued that the long-standing controversy within Structuralism between proponents of the co-occurrence hypothesis and the substitutability hypothesis in antonym research is a non-issue.Keywords: opposition, gradability, nominal meaning, metaphor, metonymy, literal, scalar, corpus, adjectives, English, semantics, noun, attributive, figurative, syntagmatic, paradigmatic, substitution hypothesis, co-occurrence hypothesis