Co-occurrences of antonymous adjectives and their contexts

Abstract

Charles and Miller propose that lexical associations between antonymous adjectives are formed via their co-occurences within the same sentence (the co-occurrence hypothesis), rather than via their syntatic substitutability (the substitutability hypothesis), and that such co-occurrences must take place more often than expected by chance. This paper provides empirical support for the co-occurrence hypothesis in a corpus analysis of all high-frequency adjectives and their antonyms and of a major group of morphologically derived antonyms (e.g., impossible, un-happy). We show that very high co-occurrence rates do appear to characterize all antonymous adjective pairs, supporting the precondition for the formation of the association; and we find that the syntactic contexts of these co-occurrences raise the intrinsic associability of antonyms when they do co-occur. We show that via one of these patterns, mutual substitution within otherwise repeated phrases in a sentence, the co-occurrences hypothesis captures the generalizations that were the basis for the substitutability hypothesis for the formation of antonymic associations.