CHAPTER 9 - SUBSTITUTION, CONTEXT, AND ASSOCIATION

Abstract

This chapter discusses the concepts of substitution, context, and association. The elicited sentences cannot give a particularly biased estimate of word contexts for the stimulus words; however, the substitution task elicits far more antonyms than can be expected on the basis of actual contextual similarities of antonyms. The collocational study involves no editing and gives statistics on text frequencies regardless of the grammatical class of the forms. In connected discourse, nouns, verbs, indefinite pronouns, determiners, prepositions, auxiliaries, nominative pronouns, and copulas are most frequent, with adjectives and adverbs relatively infrequent. For all stimulus words, except verbs and gerunds, there is a significant positive relation between association and substitution, that is, the use of semantically and grammatically paradigmatic words as associates. Where there is high commonality in substitutions, responses tend to be paradigmatic. Where there is a high primary in the precontext or high commonality in the five most common postcontexts, the responses tend to be syntagmatic.