Evaluative polarity of antonyms (original) (raw)
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Positive, Neutral, Negative Evaluation in Connotation
2006
The article focuses on evaluation-type connotation, expressed by a theoretically triple opposition (positive neutral negative, as in plump+, stout neut, obese -) which is more often represented by only two members (as in dismiss neut fire -), though even cases with no opposition can be spoken about (e.g., bald -). Though to speak about connotative opposition we basically need denotative synonyms (like high-flown +?? "pompous" -), words like "warm" + and "cold" (especially in metaphoric meanings) may be viewed as both denotative and connotative antonyms. As evaluation depends on taste, it is subjective (depending on historic period, personality of the speaker, situational and linguistic context) and therefore difficult to study or teach. This situation, anyway, should not prevent researchers and language teachers from its careful treatment as ignorance of connotation on the language users' part may cause serious problems in communication
As lexical as it gets: the role of co-occurrence of antonyms in a visual lexical decision experiment
When asked about their opinion of how good a pair of lexical items are as antonyms, speakers judge slow–fast to be a pair of strongly antonymic adjectives, while slow–rapid, slow–express and slow–blistering are perceived as less good pairings and fast–dull as less good pairing than all the others. This raises the question why some pairs are considered better pairings than others and why they form entrenched pairings in memory and conventionalized couplings in text.
Semantic profiles of antonymic adjectives in discourse
Linguistics
This study has two goals: Firstly, to give an account of the semantic organization of individually used antonymic adjectives in discourse, and secondly, based on those finding, and previous work on antonymic meanings, contribute to a comprehensive theoretical account of their representation within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The hypothesis is that the members of the pairs are used in the sLame contexts and in the same type of constructions, not only when they co-occur and are used to express binary opposition as shown in previous studies, but also when they are not. The manually coded corpus data from the BNC are analyzed along four semantic parameters: (i) the configuration of the adjectives in terms of gradability, (ii) the way they modify the nominal meanings, i.e., attributively or predicatively (iii) the meaning type of the modified nouns, and (iv) the status of the constructions with respect to whether their meanings are what we refer to as ‘basic’, metaphorical or metonymical. Correspondence analysis technique is used to identify similarities and differences on the basis of the totality of the data. As predicted, our findings confirm a high degree of pairwise similarity – and some differences. On the basis of these results, it can be argued that the long-standing controversy within Structuralism between proponents of the co-occurrence hypothesis and the substitutability hypothesis in antonym research is a non-issue.
Role of antonymy relations in semantic judgments
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 1979
Decision times for sentences or word pairs involving direct (e.g., boy-girl) or indirect (e.g., boy-sister) antonyms were measured in a sentence verification task and a lexical decision task. In Experiment 1 false sentences involving the direct antonyms were disconfirmed faster than sentences involving the indirect antonyms, even though the former were rated as more closely related in meaning. In Experiment 2 a smaller advantage for the direct antonyms was found in a lexical decision task, although "word" decisions were made more quickly for both types of antonym pairs than for pairs of unrelated words. Experiment 2 also investigated the degree of semantic facilitation obtained for category-instance word pairs. No significant latency differences were found for lexical decisions involving word pairs consisting of a category name (e.g., bird) and either a high frequency (e.g., robin) or low frequency (e.g., chicken) instance. The locus of the positive effect of semantic relatedness on falsification time for sentences involving antonyms is discussed in light of these results, as is the locus of the "typicality effect" obtained in previous semantic memory studies. An important theoretical contrast that has emerged in models of semantic memory involves the processes by which people evaluate sentences asserting semantic relations such as category membership (e.g., A rose is a flower). Feature models assume that such decisions are based on a comparison of elementary features or attributes that define the subject and predicate con
Good and bad opposites: using textual and experimental techniques to measure antonym canonicity
2009
The goal of this paper is to combine corpus methodology with experimental methods to gain insights into the nature of antonymy as a lexico-semantic relation and the degree of antonymic canonicity of word pairs in language and in memory. Two approaches to antonymy in language are contrasted, the lexical categorical model and the cognitive prototype model. The results of the investigation support the latter model and show that different pairings have different levels of lexico-semantic affinity.
Biases in use of positive and negative words across twenty natural languages
Cognition & Emotion, 2010
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Sensory modality profiles of antonyms
Language and Cognition, 2023
Adjectives that are used to describe sensory experiences are often used to express more than one modality. The adjective sweet, for instance, may primarily be associated with taste (i.e., taste is the dominant modality of sweet), but it can also be used for smell, sound or sight, and possibly even for touch. It has also been shown that some sensory modalities combine more easily than others. Many adjectives that are used to describe taste, for instance, can also be used for smell, but, less likely, for sound. These associations between sensory modalities as they are expressed in language are the topic of this study. We looked at the distribution of the combinations of dominant modalities in pairs of antonymic sensory adjectives (e.g., sweetsour), and how the dominant modality of the adjectives in these pairs differed from that of the adjectives in isolation. In our dataset, there was a sizeable number of pairs consisting of adjectives with differing dominant modalities. Within those pairs, we observed that adjectives with the dominant modality sight can also be used for touch and vice versa. Similarly, adjectives with the dominant modality of smell can also be used for taste and vice versa. Finally, adjectives with the dominant modalities sight and touch can both also be used for hearing and for taste, but not the other way around. These results contribute to our understanding of how language is used to describe sensory experiences, and, with that, how sensory experiences may be shaped by the words that we use to describe them.
Swedish opposites: A multi-method approach to goodness of antonymy
2010
This is an investigation of 'goodness of antonym pairings' in Swedish, which seeks answers to why speakers judge antonyms such as bra-dålig 'good-bad' and lång-kort 'long-short' to be better antonyms than, say, dunkel-tydlig 'obscure-clear' and rask-långsam 'speedy-slow'. The investigation has two main aims. The first aim is to provide a description of goodness of Swedish antonym pairings based on three different observational techniques: a corpus-driven study, a judgement experiment and an elicitation experiment. The second aim is to evaluate both converging and diverging results on those three indicators and to discuss them in the light of what the results tell us about antonyms in Swedish, and perhaps more importantly, what they tell us about the nature of antonymy in language and thought more generally. * Thanks to Joost van de Weijer for help with the statistics, to Anders Sjöström for help with producing figures and to Simone Löhndorf for help with data collection.
We combine corpus methodology with experimental methods to gain insights into the nature of antonymy as a lexico-semantic relations and the degree of entrenchment and routinization of antonymic word-pairs in memory. The different types of gradablity configurations in language can be tested using degree modifiers as criterial elements. UNBOUNDED gradable meaning are combinable with scaling degree modifiers, e.g. very good, BOUNDED gradable meanings with totality modifiers, e.g. absolutely terrific, and non-gradable meanings are not combinable with any degree modifiers at all (Paradis 1997). We are using 'antonymy' as a cover term for all different kinds of oppositeness in this paper. This is different from how the term is used in