The textual profile of antonyms: A corpus-based study

Abstract

AbstractUnlike the traditional approaches that describe and define antonymy on the basis of semantic properties of antonymous pairs in a language system, antonyms are in this paper considered with reference to their roles in actual language use. Antonymy has traditionally been regarded as a paradigmatic relation, but recent studies of antonym co-occurrence in electronic corpora of English and Serbian have identified two major and four minor functions of antonyms in discourse, with its accompanying lexico-syntactic patterns, matching the results of similar analyses in Japanese, Swedish, and Dutch. This paper aims to investigate the performance of three antonymous patterns in retrieving contrastive terms and the possibility to create the contrastive profile of given seed words in Serbian written discourse by means of those patterns. It also examines whether there is a relation between the markedness distinction between members of the antonymous pair and the position of the chosen seed word (i.e., whether it comes in the X or the Y position in the pattern). Results of the study show that it is possible to create the textual profile of antonyms using these lexico-syntactic constructions, and that the unmarked member has a richer contrastive profile in text.