Quantifying aspects of antonym canonicity in English and Swedish: textual and experimental (original) (raw)

This paper highlights the potential usefulness of combining corpus methods and experimental methods to gain new theoretical insights into the role of antonymy as an organizing lexicosemantic principle in human thinking and languages' vocabularies. We are intrigued by what distinguishes so-called canonical antonyms such as good-bad, long-short, thin-thick from other types of contrasts such as cold-scorching, pale-dark and speedy-slow. There are probably various converging reasons for perceptions of 'goodness of antonymy', e.g. frequency of co-occurrence, co-occurrence in certain constructions, e.g. whether slow or fast, stylistic co-occurrence preferences and pairwise acquisition (e.g. . The research reported in this paper forms part of an international collaborative project on antonymy in discourse. 1 This paper proposes (i) a principled method for creating a foundation for cross-linguistic comparisons of adjectival antonym pairings, using corpus methods and (ii) subsequently using the corpus data for the design of experiments on antonym canonicity.

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