Antonymic Discourse Functions and Manipulation: A Corpus Analysis of Present-Day French

Abstract

The study of the discourse functions of antonymy was developed mainly by Steven Jones (Antonymy: a corpus-based perspective. Routledge, London, 2002; Antonyms in english. Construals, constructions and canonicity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012), who classifies antonymic co-occurrences in English into ten categories, based on the different discourse functions they can fulfil. On the basis of a similar study of antonymic discourse functions in French, this paper explores how two opposites used in the same sentence exploit our thought processes to influence the way we conceptualise the world. It focuses on sentences extracted from the newspaper Le Monde (1987-2006 and 2009-2011) in which two antonyms are used in co-presence. Through the analysis of these utterances, this paper describes the discourse functions of antonymy in French and shows how the semantic and syntactic roles of co-present antonyms determine the semantico-referential functions they perform. I then analyse how the two major (groups of) functions, the ancillary function and the coordination functions, identified in English journalistic texts by Steven Jones, produce meaning effects in French texts, and how the mechanisms underlying these functions allow opposites to manipulate us.

A cross-linguistic study of the discourse functions of antonymy in Albanian and English

“…The syntagmatic association of antonyms in texts is also apparent considering the results of the previous studies on antonym co-occurrence, with Jones (2012) stating that "antonyms not only co-occur significantly more often in the same sentence than chance predicts but also significantly more often than other semantically related word pairs such as synonyms or hyponyms". As mentioned in the study of French language by Steffens and Marie, "the objective of Jones' research (2002) is to describe the functions of co-occurrent antonyms and to quantify their distribution in the corpus" (Steffens, 2018). This is also the main objective of our study, providing a comparative overview of the functions in the English and Albanian corpus and illustrating the distribution in terms of percentages, following the Swedish and English cross-linguistic study model.…”

“…Coordinated antonymy "signals inclusiveness or exhaustiveness of scale" (Jones, 2002), while ancillary antonymy is often based on constructional parallels with or without explicit connectors (cf. Steffens, 2018).…”

“…Cross-linguistically, antonyms were studied by various authors including Swedish (Willners, 2001; Murphy et al, 2009), Japanese (Muehleisen & Isono, 2009), Dutch (Lobanova et al, 2012), Serbian (Kostić, 2011), Romanian (Gheltofan, 2013), Arabic (Alhedayani 2016), and Chinese (Hsu, 2017) and French texts (Steffens, 2018). All the above studies are considered to be experimental rather than theoretical.…”

Antonym Sequence in Qur’anic Arabic: An Emically Etiological Approach

“…AlHedayani 2016), Turkish (Akşehirli 2018), French (Steffens 2018), and Persian (Mohamadi et al 2019a), his taxonomy of antonym sequence rules has been scantly and unduly replicated with English, but much more lamentably with other languages. Few studies were conducted on antonym sequence across few languages-a problem statement confirmed by some researchers: "Despite this abundance of previous research on antonym co-occurrence, relatively few studies have been devoted to the order of antonyms" (Wu 2017, 118) and "The few previous studies as well as the authors' initial study on the oral and written corpus reveal that antonyms' sequence is subject to a hidden regularity" (Mohamadi et al 2019b, 129).…”

Sposoby przedstawiania relacji człowiek-zwierzę w tekstach z XX i XXI wieku

“…2009, Muehleisen, Isono 2009Lobanova i in. 2010;Kostić 2011Kostić , 2015Hsu 2015;Hassanein 2018;Steffens 2018). W niektórych pracach tego typu wykorzystywano korpusy ogólne danego języka: angielskiego, japońskiego, chińskiego czy serbskiego.…”