A lexico-syntactic analysis of antonym co-occurrence in spoken English

Abstract

Antonymy has always been regarded as a key lexical relation (see Leech 1974; Lyons 1977; or Cruse 1986). Recently, corpus data have allowed for the co-occurrence frequency of antonym pairs to be quantified and the various discourse functions of antonymy to be identified (e.g., Justeson and Katz 1991; Mettinger 1994; Fellbaum 1995; Jones 2002). The corpora upon which these studies were based all consisted exclusively of written language, so this paper addresses a question that has previously been overlooked: how are antonyms used in spoken language? Answers are provided using a corpus containing nearly ten million words of data, taken from the spoken component of the British National Corpus. A search for 56 antonym pairs is conducted, allowing a total of 955 contexts to be classified and analyzed. The distribution of discourse functions among these pairs is assessed, comparisons are made with the corresponding distribution in written