Co-Occurrence and Antonymy

Abstract

This paper extends Charles and Miller's (1989) co-occurrence hypothesis, which states that antonymous adjectives co-occur in the same sentence with frequencies far greater than predicted by chance. In searching the Brown Corpus for intrasentential co-occurrences of semantically opposed verbs, nouns, and adjectives, we found that words expressing antonymous concepts co-occur with higher-than-chance frequencies independent of the syntactic category by which these underlying concepts are lexicalized. Thus, many semantically opposed words that co-occur in the same sentence have different syntactic environments and are not substitutable for one another. This finding argues against the assumption that children learn both the meaning and the syntactic category of antonymous words together as a result of their co-occurrence in parallel syntactic slots. Some possible reasons for the intrasentential co-occurrence of semantically opposed words are outlined.