Discourse functions of antonymy: A cross-linguistic investigation of Swedish and English

Abstract

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. #

Semantic profiles of antonymic adjectives in discourse

“…Our results thus lend support to the currently rather large number of studies concerned with antonym canonicity in the literature as reported in the introduction, and it complements the antonym literature that deals with antonym cooccurrence in text and discourse (Willners 2001;Jones 2002;Jones et al 2007;Murphy et al 2009;Lobanova 2012). It also lends support to a similar study of adjectives restricted to the domain of size carried out by Gries and Otani (2010).…”

“…Syntagmatic associates are neighbors of one another in actual text and they co-occur in sequence (horizontally) (Charles and Miller 1989;Justeson and Katz 1991;Willners 2001, Mohammad et al 2013. This is known as the co-occurrence hypothesis and has been shown to hold good for antonymic words too (Jones et al 2007;Murphy et al 2009;Kostić 2011;Lobanova 2012).…”

As lexical as it gets: The role of co-occurrence of antonyms in a visual lexical decision experiment

“…The same assumptions are made in corpus-based treatments of antonym co-occurrence in text (Jones 2002, 2007, Muehleisen and Isono 2009, Murphy et al 2009). These studies concern the aspect of frequently co-occurring antonyms serving various contrasting discourse functions in text in constructional frames such as 'neither X nor Y', 'X instead of Y', the difference between X and Y'.…”

“…Paradis and Willners 2007, Jones 2007, Murphy et al 2009, Willners and Paradis 2010. Antonym canonicity or goodness of opposability is the extent to which antonyms are both semantically related and conventionalized as pairs in language (Murphy 2003: 31).…”

Word Class and Textual Functions of Antonyms: A Corpus Study

“…Just like Fellbaum, Jones noted the existence of lexical and syntactic frames in which antonyms co-occur but he also gave an indepth analysis and classification of the discourse functions performed by antonyms in such frames. These discourse categories have been found in other genres (spoken English [Jones, 2006[Jones, , 2007) and registers of English (child and child-directed speech [Jones & Murphy, 2005;Murphy & Jones, 2008]) and other languages (Swedish [Murphy et al, 2009], Japanese [Muehleisen & Isono, 2009] and Serbian [Kostić, 2011]). …”