ANTONYMS

The meaning of a word may be partially defined by saying what it is not. Female means not male. Dead not alive. Words that are opposite in meaning are often called antonyms. Ironically, the basic property of two words is that they share all but one semantic property. Beautiful and tall are not antonyms; beautiful and ugly, or tall and short are. The property they do not share is present in one and absent in the other. Thus, in order to be opposites, two words must be semantically similar or in the same semantic category, such as ‘gender’ or ‘height’. means

       There are several kinds of antonymy. There are complementary pairs.

                Alive/dead            present/absent                      awake/sleep

They are complementary in that not alive  = dead and not dead = alive, and so on.

                There are gradable pairs of antonyms:

                big/small                hot/cold                 fast/slow                happy/sad

With gradable pairs the negative of one word is not synonymous with the other. For example, someone who is not happy is not necessarily sad. It is also true for gradable antonyms that more of one is less of another. More bigness is less smallness; wider is less narrow, and taller is less short. Another characteristic of many pairs of gradable antonyms is that one is marked and the other unmarked. The unmarked member is the one used in questions of degree. We ask ‘How high is it?’(not ‘How low is it?’) or ‘How tall is she?’ We answer ‘Three hundred meters high’ or ‘one an a half meters tall’ but never ‘One and a half meters short’, except humorously. High and tall are the unmarked members of high/low and tall/short. Notice that the meanings of these adjectives and other similar ones are relative. The words themselves provide no information about absolute size. Because of our knowledge of the language, and of things in the world, this relativity normally causes no confusion. Thus we know that ‘ a small elephant’ is much bigger than ‘a big mouse’. is it?’ (not ‘How

       Another kind of ‘opposite’ involves pairs like

                Give/receive,  buy/sell,  teacher/pupil

They are called relational opposites, and they display symmetry in their meaning. If X gives Y to Z, the Z receives Y from X. If X is Y’s teacher, then Y is X’s pupil. Pairs of words ending in –er and –ee are usually relational opposite. If Mary is Bill’s employer, Then Bill is Mary’s employee.

      These relationships may be expressed formally through meaning postulates:

                (X) gives (Y,Z) ↔ (Z) receives (Y,X)

                (X) teacher (Y) ↔ (Y) pupil (X)

      Comparative forms of gradable pairs of adjectives often form relational pairs. Thus, if sally is taller than Alfred, then Alfred is shorter than Sally. If a Mercedes is more expensive than a Ford, then a Ford is cheaper than Mercedes.

      If meanings of words were indissoluble wholes, there would be no way to make the interpretations that we do. We know that big and red are not opposites. Because they have too few semantic properties in common. They are both adjectives, but big is in the semantic class involving size, whereas red is color. On the other hand, buy/sell are relational opposites because both contain the semantic property ‘transfer of property’, and they differ only in one property, ‘direction of transfer’.

      Redundancy rules on semantic features can reveal our knowledge about antonyms. Consider:

                [+ married ]-- >  [- single]    [+ single] -- > [- married]

These rules show that any word that bears the semantic property ‘married’, such as wife, is understood to lack the semantic property ‘single’; and conversely, any word that bears the semantic property ‘single’, such as bachelor, will not have the property ‘married’.

      In English there are a number of ways to form antonyms. You can add the prefix un:

                            Likely/unlikely               able/unable           fortunate/unfortunate

or you can add non:

                             Entity/nonentity              conformist/nonconformist

or you can add in:

                            tolerant/intolerant       discreet/indiscreet        decent/indecent

     Because we know the semantic properties of words, we know when two words are antonyms, or homonyms, or are unrelated in meaning.