Opposites (Antonymy)
In traditional terminology, antonyms are words which are opposite in meaning. It is useful, however, to identify several different types of relationship under a more general label of opposition. There are a number of relations which seem to involve words which are at the same time related in meaning yet incompatible or contrasting; we list some of them below.
Simple antonyms This is a relation between words such that the positive of one implies the negative of the other. The pairs are also sometimes called complementary pairs or binary pairs. In effect, the words form a two-term classification. Examples would include:
3.34 dead/alive (of e.g. animals)
pass/fail (a test)
hit/miss (a target)
So, using these words literally, dead implies not alive, etc. which explains the semantic oddness of sentences like:
3.35 ?My pet python is dead but luckily it’s still alive.
Of course speakers can creatively alter these two-term classifications for special effects: we can speak of someone being half dead; or we know that in horror films the undead are not alive in the normal sense.
Gradable antonyms This is a relationship between opposites where the positive of one term does not necessarily imply the negative of the other, e.g. rich/poor, fast/slow, young/old, beautiful/ugly. This relation is typically associated with adjectives and has two major identifying characteristics: firstly, there are usually intermediate terms so that between the gradable antonyms hot and cold we can find:
3.36 hot (warm tepid cool) cold
This means of course that something may be neither hot nor cold. Sec­ondly, the terms are usually relative, so a thick pencil is likely to be thinner than a thin girl; and a late dinosaur fossil is earlier than an early Elvis record. A third characteristic is that in some pairs one term is more basic and common, so for example of the pair long/short, it is more natural to ask of something How long is it? than How short is it? For other pairs there is no such pattern: How hot is it? and Hon cold is it? are equally natural depending on context. Other examples of gradable antonyms are: tall/short, clever/ stupid, near/far, interesting/boring.
Reverses The characteristic reverse relation is between terms describing movement, where one term describes movement in one direction, ?, and the other the same movement in the opposite direction, ?; for example the terms push and pull on a swing door, which tell you in which direction to apply force. Other such pairs are come/go, go/return: ascend/descend. When describing motion the following can be called reverses: (go) up/down, (go) in/out, (turn) right/left.
By extension, the term is also applied to any process which can be reversed: so other reverses are inflate/deflate, expand/contract, fill/empty or knit/unravel.
Converses These are terms which describe a relation between two entities from alternate viewpoints, as in the pairs:
3.37 own/belong to
above/below
employer/employee
Thus if we are told Alan owns this book then we know automatically This hook belongs to Alan. or from Henen is David’s employer we know David is Henen’s employee. Again, these relations are part of a speaker’s semantic knowledge and explain why the two sentences below are paraphrases, i.e. can be used to describe the same situation:
3.38 My office is above the library.
3.39 The library is below my office.
Taxonomic sisters The term antonymy is sometimes used to describe words which are at the same level in a taxonomy. Taxonomies are classification systems; we take as an example the colour adjectives in English, and give a selection below:
We can say that the words red and blue are sister-members of the same taxonomy and therefore incompatible with each other. Hence one can say:
3.41 His car isn’t red, it’s blue.
Other taxonomies might include the days of the week: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc., or any of the taxonomies we use to describe the natural world, like types of dog: poodle, setter, bulldog, etc. Some taxonomies are closed, like days of the week: we can’t easily add another day, without changing the whole system. Others are open, like the flavours of ice cream sold in an ice cream parlour: someone can always come up with a new flavour and extend the taxonomy.
In the next section we see that taxonomies typically have a hierarchical structure, and thus we will need terms to describe vertical relations, as well as the horizontal ‘sisterhood’ relation.
John Saeed, 1997, Semantics, 66-68, Blackwell Publishers Ltd.