9.1 How do antonyms emerge?

Last week, we looked at lexical items that have the same meaning—synonyms. We had a first exploration of the implications of Cognitive Linguistic on meaning-related phenomena. We got to know the Principle of no synonymy, which claims that there must be a difference in meaning if there is a difference in form. There is a strong focus on usage patterns in this view. Meaning is seen as being inseparable from use, therefore, co-occurrence patterns become extremely important.

If lexemes cannot have exactly the same meaning, can they even have opposite meanings? Does it even make sense to speak of opposite use? If we reject a componential model of meaning, antonyms become a problem at a first glance. There are two main ways to explain antonymy. The traditional one is that antonyms can paradigmatically replace their opposite.

Paradigmatic, replaceable

45. He was a good dog.
46. He was a bad dog.
47. I feel good today.
48. I feel bad today.

In fact, that makes them extremely similar in their use. You would expect similar collocates, constructions and syntax.

Justeson & Katz (1991) argue against this view and propose that the intuition we have that some words have direct opposites is grounded in their co-occurrence syntagmatically.

Syntagmatic, co-occurrence

49. There are good and bad dogs.
50. Some dogs are good, some are bad.
51. I feel neither good nor bad.
52. Good jokes make people laugh, unlike bad ones.

One fascinating aspect of these observations is that, while synonyms occur in wildly different contexts, antonyms tend to occur together. The hypothesis is that we think of antonyms as antonyms exactly because we see experience them together all the time. high and low are contiguous; they co-occur—high and flat are not, because they don’t not because of some objective meaning components. In fact, there is usually only one antonym within a set of synonyms. If we assume a componential model based on truth-conditions, this would be difficult to explain. Taking logical meaning components alone does not explain speaker intuition.