Antonymous Adjectives Research Articles

Рецепция студентами рок-текстов рубежа XX–XXI веков: экспериментальное исследование

The article is devoted to the study of Russian rock as a specific segment of national fiction. The method of semantic differential, widespread in psycholinguistics, contributed to the identification of the emotional-rational semantic dominant of rock texts of the turn of the 20th–21st centuries. The characterization of students’ perception results is motivated by the use of graded scales with bipolar antonymic adjectives.

Du paradigme vers le syntagme — l’antonymie adjectivale : quelques remarques

This paper raises and discusses the relation of antonymy in adjectives. Antonymy is considered to play an important role in organizing mental lexicon. This relation defined often in logical terms stands for paradigmatic relation, as presented in WordNet. However, the category of antonymous adjectives can depend on more than just the semantic qualities of a word. It is often highly context dependent. Adjectives have different interpretation depending on the noun they modify — it is no surprising that they produce different antonyms in different contexts. On the basis of few examples of investigations of antonymy, this paper argues that antonymy is not only a paradigmatic but also a syntagmatic relation. The paradigmatic-syntagmatic distinction is not always relevant to all antonymous adjectives.

Differences and similarities of root and derivational forms of antonymic adjectives in two languages

In this paper it is discussed and highlighted some structural and functional patterns, multiaspectness and usage of antonyms in morphological structure of words and according to their root and derivational forms antonymic adjectives were analyzed in two languages, namely in English and Russian.

Родительская оценка качеств безопасного поведения личности детей младшего школьного, подросткового и юношеского возраста

The article deals with the issue of studying safety behaviour in psychology from the point of view of factors that influence this phenomenon. It presents results of a research aimed at understanding how parents assess safe behaviour of their children with and without mental disorders depending on the child’s age. Our hypothesis was that parental assessments of their children’s personality traits associated with safe behaviours would differ according to the children’s age (primary school, adolescent and young age) and mental abilities. The study involved 204 subjects: 136 parents of children without mental disorders (128 females and 8 males) and 68 parents of children with mental disorders (58 females and 10 males).We used the semantic differential method: the parents were asked to assess their children’s personal qualities associated with safe behaviour. The semantic differential was formed with two-pole scales of antonymous adjectives that described personality traits in terms of safe behavior. The adjectives were divided into groups based on three assessment factors: Assessment, Strength, and Activity. The research findings allow us to assume that the age factor has no influence on the manifestation of personal features related to safe behaviour. Yet, mental disorders affect their formation in every assessment factor: Assessment (p≤0,001), Strength (p≤0,01), Activity (p≤0,001).The findings can be useful in creating programmes aimed at developing safe lifestyle both in healthy and mentally disabled children and adolescents.

Types of Attitudes toward Traits and Their Role in Selfand Other Assessments

The study integrates the experimental and descriptive approaches to the attitudes. The assumptions that the emotional, cognitive and behavioral components of attitudes toward personality traits, as well as the types of these attitudes mediate the selfand the Other assessments are under consideration. The study involved 314 students aged 18 to 30 years old (M = 20.23; SD = 1.59), of which 79 men (25%) and 235 women (75%). To measure attitudes toward traits, as well as the selfand the Other assessments, a list of 20 antonymic adjectives denoting personality characteristics was used. The objects of perception were young man and woman who answered the questions of the Short Dark Triad Questionnaire as an absolutely “good” or “bad” person. Using cluster analysis, different types of attitudes toward traits were highlighted within each component (cognitive, emotional, and behavioral). These types were determined by the participants’ position in relation to positive and negative traits. The attained results indicate that the subject’s self-esteem depends on the attitudes toward traits and detects different severity depending on the attitudes type. The highest self-esteem is observed in those subjects who: 1) consider that positive traits are more common than negative; 2) give highly contrast emotional ratings to positive and negative traits; 3) believe that positive traits are less controlled than negative ones. The assessment of the Other also reveals a connection with the types of the attitudes toward traits: the “good” Other is rated higher when the emotional attitudes toward traits are highly contrast, while the “bad” Other is rated higher when: 1) the negative traits are treated as more common; 2) the contrast between positive and negative traits is perceived as moderate. The results obtained open up the new perspectives for the correction of the selfand the Other assessments through the formation of attitudes toward traits.

Antonymous Adjectives Markedly Used


 The concept of “markedness in the work of Prague school linguists refers to relationships between two complementary or antonymous terms which can be distinguished by the presence of a feature (+a versus -a). Such a position can occur at various linguistic levels. Markedness contrasts for example, can arise at the morphological level, when one of the two words is derived from the other and therefore contains an explicit formal marker such as a prefix (profitable - unprofitable). Markedness contrasts also appear at the semantic level in many pairs of gradable antonymous adjectives, especially scalar ones.

Niekonwencjonalny, czyli lepszy – komponent wartościujący a znaczenie słów konwencjonalny i niekonwencjonalny w języku polskim

The aim of this article is to describe the interpenetration of the descriptive and the evaluative components in language on the basis of a pair of antonymous adjectives conventional / unconventional as well as to analyse their contextual evaluation. The research material is composed of the dictionary data and concordances of the analyzed adjectives derived from The National Corpus of Polish ( Narodowy Korpus Jezyka Polskiego ). The conducted analysis has revealed the possibility of classifying the discussed adjectives into the group of words used for expressing description and evaluation. Furthermore, the investigation of the collected data has indicated that the Polish language tends to attribute negative values to the aspects widely assumed to be conventional, whereas positive evaluation is ascribed to the unconventional ones. Thus, in the case of the analysed words, the descriptive component is not parallel with the evaluative one. Something that is conventional according to dictionary definitions is consistent with the norm and expected by the society but, at the same time, it is assessed as secure, boring, uninteresting and unoriginal. Something that is unconventional, in turn, even though not established in accordance with widely accepted norms, is perceived as interesting, astonishing, brave, but also dangerous and unrecognized. It can be acknowledged, then, that in the case of the analyzed words the existing discrepancy between the descriptive and evaluative components is a sign that language follows the constantly changing reality which nowadays values a person who is able to play with convention rather than only comply with it.

Antonymous Adjectives in Disyllabic Lexical Compounds in Mandarin: A Cognitive Linguistics Perspective

Antonymous Adjectives in Disyllabic Lexical Compounds in Mandarin: A Cognitive Linguistics Perspective

Semantic profiles of antonymic adjectives in discourse

AbstractThis study has two goals: First, to give an account of the semantic organization of individually used antonymic adjectives in discourse and second, based on those findings and previous work on antonymic meanings, to contribute to a comprehensive theoretical account of their representation within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The hypothesis is that the members of the pairs are used in the same contexts and in the same type of constructions, not only when they co-occur and are used to express binary opposition as shown in previous studies, but also when they do not. The manually coded corpus data from the BNC are analyzed along four semantic parameters: (i) the configuration of the adjectives in terms of gradability, (ii) the way they modify the nominal meanings, i.e., attributively or predicatively (iii) the meaning type of the modified nouns, and (iv) the status of the constructions with respect to whether their meanings are what we refer to as “basic”, metaphorical or metonymical. Correspondence analysis technique is used to identify similarities and differences on the basis of the totality of the data. As predicted, our findings confirm a high degree of pairwise similarity – but also some differences. On the basis of these results, it can be argued that the long-standing controversy within Structuralism between proponents of the co-occurrence hypothesis and the substitutability hypothesis in antonym research is a non-issue.

Cooking from cold to hot: goal-directedness in simulation and language

AbstractThe present study explores the processing of temporal information in event knowledge by focusing on the transition from an earlier, source state to a later, goal state. Participants were presented with an event verb followed by antonymous adjectives or adverbs denoting an earlier state and a later state. The states were presented either chronologically (to cook: cold – hot) or inversely (to cook: hot – cold) with regard to the denoted event. Participants were asked to identify either the earlier or the later state. We found that later states are identified faster and more accurately than earlier states. Later states presented chronologically were identified even more quickly than later states presented inversely. We attribute our results to the fact that directedness towards the goal state is a general principle of cognition which plays a fundamental role in language and in simulation, whereby language processing provides faster and more direct access to goals even than simulation.

Adjective production by Russian-speaking children with specific language impairment

Research on specific language impairment (SLI) has primarily focused on the acquisition of nouns and verbs. Less attention has been given to other content-word classes, such as adjectives and adverbs. This article investigates adjective production by 7- to 10-year-old Russian-speaking children with SLI and their typically developing (TD) peers and focuses on the production of antonymous adjectives and degree markers in an elicitation experiment. The results show that degree morphology is more impaired in SLI than antonymy. In antonym production, children with SLI were able to catch up with their TD peers by age 8. In the domain of degree, however, the SLI group lagged behind the TD controls across all ages studied. Error analysis indicates that language-impaired children have particular difficulty with agreement inflection and affixal negations. They also substitute adjectives with specific meanings by more general terms. The implications of this study for the morphological-richness hypothesis are discussed.

Scales in the meaning of adjectives

The goal of this paper is to show that a degree-based semantics for comparative constructions in English, based on a degree ontology going back to Cresswell (1976), meets the challenge of polarity effects in antonymous adjectives, once it is properly adapted to deal with measure expressions and the so called norm-related inferences. I present an alternative to theories that rely on a shift from degrees as points to degrees as intervals as proposed in von Stechow (1984). My approach builds on the assumption that degrees constitute simple ordinal scales and measures are introduced at the LF by necessity of interpreting numerals. The proposal is evaluated against the data from two languages with completely different polarity patterns, English and Russian.

The linguistics of zero: A cognitive reference point or a phantom?

Insights from cognitive psychology indicate that the zero value on a scale is an important reference-point phenomenon in the processing of relative adjectives. However, linguistic evidence for the reference-point status of the zero value has not been provided hitherto. In this paper, I search for such evidence by analyzing the use of dimensional adjectives denoting vertical size in two languages – English and Russian. Three types of linguistic implications of the zero are discussed. First, the zero point is crucial to the account of markedness asymmetry between antonymous adjectives. Second, the reference-point status of the zero value motivates differences in the compatibility of relative adjectives with maximality adverbs in languages such as Russian. Third, the location of the zero point and the position of the entity vis-à-vis the zero point have implications for adjective-noun combinability.

Antonymous adjectives in Japanese discourse

Following the research into discourse functions of antonyms in corpora of written English, spoken English, and written Swedish, this study examines the functions of antonymy in Japanese, a language which diverges significantly from both English and Swedish in terms of morphology, syntax, orthography, and discourse features. The study focuses on twelve pairs of ‘basic’ antonyms, including furui/ atarashii ‘old/new’ and hiroi/ semai ‘wide/narrow’, identifying the discourse functions and the common grammatical constructions in which they occur. It is found that the discourse functions previously identified for English and Swedish are apt for describing Japanese too, although there appear to be some differences in the frequency with which the various functions are used in a large Japanese corpus. Finally, it is shown how one of the common constructions identified in the study can be used to find more examples of antonyms in the Japanese corpus.

Polar Opposition and the Ontology of `Degrees'

This paper uses the distribution and interpretation of antonymous adjectives in comparative constructions as an empirical basis to argue that abstract representations of measurement, or ‘degrees’, must be modeled as intervals on a scale, rather than as points, as commonly assumed. I begin by demonstrating that the facts in this domain must be accounted for in terms of the interaction of the semantics of adjectival polarity and the semantics of the comparative, rather than principles governing the (overt) expression of particular types of adjectives in comparatives. I then show that a principled account of the full range of data under consideration can be constructed within a model in which degrees are formalized as intervals on a scale and adjectival polarity is characterized in terms of two structurally distinct and complementary sorts of `positive' and `negative' degrees.

Co-Occurrence and Antonymy

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.

Gender and the political interview in an Australian context

Research in the area of gender/sex differences of women's and men's language has been characterised by typologies of pairs of antonymous adjectives (e.g. public/private; assertive/ passive etc.). These descriptions, while preferable to pairs of marked and unmarked terms (e.g. male/not male), contribute to the persistence of static stereotypes for women and men, e.g. ‘women are more comfortable in private forms and contexts of discourse owing to their cooperative, facilitative nature, etc’. The context for the investigation reported here is the public arena, i.e. televised media interviews, a setting in which a growing number of Australian women participate as journalists and interviewers. The question for this investigation is not centred upon access to the public context but rather on the nature and diversity of participation within a gendered situation. In this paper, investigation of the turn-taking and questioning strategies of two prominent media personalities (a woman and a man) reveal differing outcomes according to the gendered context. The constraints and freedoms that impinge on the interviewer's style are, however, distinct in the construction of information exchange and image creation processes of the political interviews. Thus women's participation in the Australian media today involves a delicate balance of individuality and compliance.

Co-occurrences of antonymous adjectives and their contexts

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.

Contexts of antonymous adjectives

ABSTRACTThe method of sorting is used to compare sets of adjectival contexts. Contexts of directly antonymous adjectives are found to be highly discriminable, both with sentential and phrasal contexts. These results are used to argue that words with different meanings normally appear in discriminably different contexts, and that the cue for learning to associate direct antonyms is not their substitutability, but rather their relatively frequent co-occurrence in the same sentence.

Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar

Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar