4.2 How do antonyms emerge?

We have seen quite a few examples of various types of antonymy in Justeson & Katz (1991). Let’s approach this from a different perspective by first thinking about synonyms, words with the same meaning, rather than the opposite. A typical example is the pair buy and purchase. Both words have to do with the exchange of money in one direction and the exchange of some sort of counter value in the other direction. Sameness can be claimed on the basis that substituting those words in context won’t change the proposition of the sentence.

  1. We’ve bought more of the chocolate you like.
  2. We’ve purchased more of the chocolate you like.

Roughly speaking, the real-world situation the sentences describe is likely the same. Yet the example in 29 sounds unusual in the context of chocolate. The substitution is also not possible in all contexts. Consider the following example where a different sense of buy is used that roughly means believe.

  1. She told me she’d never eaten chocolate, but I don’t buy it.
  2. She told me she’d never eaten chocolate, but I don’t purchase it.

The reading believe is not available for purchase. True synonymy in the sense of perfect substitutability is rare if it exists at all. The only candidates might be dialectal variations of words with very specific meanings, such as German Brötchen, Schrippe, Semmel. There are always differences in connotation and at the very least differences in use. You find different distributions, collocations and fixed expressions. For example, the phrase Brötchen verdienen is common in German but Schrippen verdienen isn’t, even in regions where Schrippe is the more common word.

At this point, the existence of true synonyms depends on the very definition of meaning. In Usage-Based linguistics, the lines between denotation, connotation and distributional properties is blurred on the assumption that all of these aspects are intertwined. The “Principle of no Synonymy” (Goldberg 1995) is a prominent idea from this paradigm. 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? There is clearly an intuition for oppositeness. There are two main ways to explain antonymy. The traditional one is that antonyms can paradigmatically replace their opposite.

Paradigmatic, replaceable

  1. He was a good dog.
  2. He was a bad dog.
  3. I feel good today.
  4. 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

  1. There are good and bad dogs.
  2. Some dogs are good, some are bad.
  3. I feel neither good nor bad.
  4. 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.

References

Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. 1st edition. University Of Chicago Press.
Justeson, John & Slava M Katz. 1991. Co-occurrences of antonymous adjectives and their contexts. Computational linguistics. MIT Press 17(1). 1–19.