Antonyms in English: Construals, Constructions and Canonicity

Studies in English Language

by Steven Jones, M. Lynne Murphy, Carita Paradis

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.

186 pages, Paperback

First published January 23, 2012

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Reviews

[Jeff Lilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. It surveys the current state of research quickly and thoroughly, and makes it clear that antonym research is both very difficult and very important. There are several different ways to approach the research, and it’s rather like trying to explore the ocean with radar: some things come through clearly, others are hazy, and most of it remains mysterious. The book lands on an analysis I basically agree with, but the proposal (the idea of an Antonym Construction that is only lexical, with no syntactic or surface ordering information) is bold, and I think has a lot of theoretical implications. I think construction grammars already have a problem of “overgenerating” possible linguistic expressions (i.e., they are good at describing observed languages, but would also be good at describing languages that are not observed) and lexical-only constructions would only make that problem worse.