Antonym Pairs Research Articles

A cross-linguistic study of lexical and derived antonymy

Abstract Antonymy is the lexical relation of opposition. The nature of the oppositeness may differ – e.g., contradictory (‘true’–‘false’) or gradable (‘tall’–‘short’) – and there may be variation as to the relationship in their formal encoding, whether the antonyms are expressed as distinct lexical forms (e.g., true vs. false) or if one form is derived from the other (e.g., true vs. untrue). We investigate the relationship between the two members of 37 antonym pairs across 55 spoken languages in order to see whether there are patterns in how antonymy is expressed and which of the two antonym members is more likely to be derived from the other. We find great variation in the extent to which languages use derivation (labeled “neg-constructed forms”) as an antonym-formation strategy. However, when we do find a derived form, this tends to target the member of the pair that is either lower in valence (positive vs. negative) or magnitude (more vs. less), in line with our hypotheses. We also find that antonyms that belong to a core set of property concepts are more likely to encode antonyms as distinct lexical forms, whereas peripheral property concepts are relatively more likely to encode the antonyms with derived forms.

Lexico-syntactic analysis of antonyms in some speeches of John Dramani Mahama

Language and politics are intertwined. This is because in order to champion political interest, politicians rely on some powerful linguistic resources to communicate with their audience. Available literature suggests that one of such linguistic resources is antonyms. However, researchers have not paid attention to the use of antonyms in political discourse, especially, in Ghana. On account of this, the present study investigated the lexico-syntactic features of antonyms in some speeches of John Dramani Mahama, a former President of the Republic of Ghana. The study is an interface between cognitive semantics and political discourse which sought to discover the lexico-syntactic features and the functional implications of the antonym pairs used in the speeches of John Dramani Mahama. The study was conducted within the framework of the Lexical Field Theory and the speeches were analysed, using the qualitative research method. Through the use of purposive sampling method, sixteen (16) political speeches of John Dramani Mahama were selected for the analysis. The study relied on Cruse’s (1986) outlined features of antonymy and Murphy’s (2003) theoretical view on context-derived antonymy to identify the antonym pairs in the speeches. The study discovered one hundred and seventy-three (173) antonym pairs in the sixteen (16) selected speeches. The outcome of the study further revealed the noun phrase pair as the largest grammatical category in the selected speeches. The study again showed that John Dramani Mahama usually uses noun antonymic pairs and the coordinated frame X and Y in his political speeches. The study concluded that John Dramani Mahama uses antonyms in his speeches to persuade his audience, establish association, inspire hope and confidence, call for patriotism and hardworking towards national development, and finally, to present his political vision to Ghanaians.

Antonyms in 19th-Century Prose: Quantitative Analysis and Its Idiostylistic Interpretation

This article explores the use of corpora to identify characteristic and individual authorial peculiarities in the use of antonyms in nineteenth-century prose, based on sources such as major antonym dictionaries and corpora for texts by A. P. Chekhov, F. M. Dostoevsky, I. A. Goncharov, I. S. Turgenev, and L. N. Tolstoy. The analytical unit in question is a lexical bigram, i.e. two words in a single phrase, five words apart — left or right. The selection consists of 1933 antonym pairs in context. Comparative statistical analysis has revealed the existence of antonyms used by all the authors in question, a certain “core” of Russian literary antonymy. The most ubiquitous are juxtapositions with semantics such as: alive and dead, good and evil, as well as categories of time, space and emotion. The author identifies textual preconditions for the emergence of antonymous pairs. They are reflections on complex questions of existence, human psychology, interpersonal relationships, social life, etc. Antonyms are often used to describe a person’s appearance, character and psychological state. The article identifies idiostylistic features of the use of antonyms in the works of five Russian writers. A. P. Chekhov’s works are characterised by the use of antonyms to describe emotional and physical qualities of a person. In Dostoevsky, antonymy is prominent in themes of belief and disbelief. I. A. Goncharov points to controversies in the philosophy of life, while in Frigate “Pallada” he appears as a traveller, noting contrasting or complementary qualities of different ethnic groups. Rare examples of authorial use of antonymy in Turgenev’s work support the idiostylistic importance of emotional traits. Antonymy in Tolstoy’s prose is primarily linked to social and family spheres, to the understanding of history, and to the development of the state. The article outlines further directions for research on authorial antonyms based on a wider range of material.

ConcVAE: Conceptual Representation Learning.

Disentangled representation learning aims at obtaining an independent latent representation without supervisory signals. However, the independence of a representation does not guarantee interpretability to match human intuition in the unsupervised settings. In this article, we introduce conceptual representation learning, an unsupervised strategy to learn a representation and its concepts. An antonym pair forms a concept, which determines the semantically meaningful axes in the latent space. Since the connection between signifying words and signified notions is arbitrary in natural languages, the verbalization of data features makes the representation make sense to humans. We thus construct Conceptual VAE (ConcVAE), a variational autoencoder (VAE)-based generative model with an explicit process in which the semantic representation of data is generated via trainable concepts. In visual data, ConcVAE utilizes natural language arbitrariness as an inductive bias of unsupervised learning by using a vision-language pretraining, which can tell an unsupervised model what makes sense to humans. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that the conceptual inductive bias in ConcVAE effectively disentangles the latent representation in a sense-making manner without supervision. Code is available at https://github.com/ganmodokix/concvae.

Translatability of Ancillary Antonymy in the Qur’an: A Lexicosyntactic Approach

Among Muslims there is a dogmatic belief in the linguistic inimitability of Qur’anic discourse that places limitations on its translatability at different linguistic levels and constitutes a minefield of hurdles when translating it between incongruous and incommensurable languages. One understudied linguistic level is the lexical-semantic level and one unstudied issue is the frames and functions of ancillary antonymy in the Qur’anic discourse. This article explores the translatability of ancillary antonym frames and functions from Qur’anic Arabic into English, using a lexicosyntactic approach to seven English translations available and accessible in the Quranic Arabic Corpus (QAC). Findings demonstrate that the Qur’an translators in focus are at great variance in rendering the syntactic frames and discourse functions of ancillary antonymy into English. There are also noticeable variations in the translatorial syntagmatic chains and paradigmatic choices as a result of adopting different translational strategies, notably explicitation, implicitation, domestication, foreignization, reproduction, substitution, and exonymy. The main conclusion is that ancillary antonym pairs co-occur within syntactic frames and co-perform discourse functions which must be attended and rendered into target texts.

A cross-linguistic study of the discourse functions of antonymy in Albanian and English


 Antonymy is considered a binary lexical-semantic opposition of words, a lexical-sematic relation among other relations such as synonymy, hyponymy, and meronymy. Several authors have categorized the binary opposition of antonyms when considering the typology of antonyms. Issues such as the use of antonyms in discourse, how different languages use antonyms, patterns of distribution, etc., will be dealt with in this paper. This study aims to provide a comparative perspective of the Albanian and English patterns of co-occurrence of antonymous pairs in sentences. The co-occurrence of antonyms in sentences and the roles of antonymous pairs have been the object of cross-linguistic study in different languages, including French, Swedish, Chinese, Serbian, Rumanian, etc. This article adds to the list of cross-linguist studies, providing a broader database for further comparative studies and opening the way to other comparative studies between similar and different languages other than English. This article aims to identify examples of antonym pairs co-occurring in the same syntactic frame using an empirical, quantitative method. The Albanian National Corpus is used as a “clinical setting” for the investigation. A detailed analysis of the distribution of such pairs in the English and Albanian corpora, with examples illustrating similarities and differences. Both languages show a predominance of ancillary and coordinated antonymy. Also, coordinated antonyms are more significant in number in both languages and are followed by the second major group of ancillary antonyms. Regarding differences, far more examples were classified as residual in Albanian than in English.
 
 
 Key Words: antonymy, co-occurrence, pairs, corpus-based research, discourse functions

Analysis of the Unbalanced Phenomenon of the Antonyms "More" and "Less"

"More" and "Less" are a pair of antonyms that we often use in both spoken and written language. They always appear in pairs, but there are significant differences in the semantic scope, word formation, collocation, and frequency of use between the two, resulting in an imbalance of antonyms. This article mainly analyzes the imbalance phenomenon of this pair of antonyms from the four aspects mentioned above.

A Corpus-Based Study of the Order of Adjectives in Japanese Antonym Sequences: The Role of Markedness and Frequency

Abstract This study investigates whether the order of adjectives in antonym pairs (e.g., ii ‘good, warui ‘bad’) in single sentences of Japanese follows principles of markedness and whether the more frequently used antonym is more likely to be used first. Based on data collected from the Tsukuba Web Corpus, the results of the study were that both markedness and frequency equally influence the order of antonym pairs. This study suggests that markedness plays a role in determining the ordering of adjectives in antonym pairs. Additionally, it was found that markedness affects the order in terms of factors of positivity and magnitude.

Оценка в семантике лексем «жизнь» и «смерть»

The aim of the research is to identify evaluative components in the structure of the lexical meanings of the pair of words “life” – “death”. The work uses a set of methods of linguistic analysis. The scientific novelty of the research lies in analysing evaluative components in the semantic structures of the pair of antonyms “life” – “death”, namely, in describing asymmetry and symmetry in the pragmatic macro-component of the meaning of these words: asymmetry manifests itself in the direction of pragmatic evaluation of the phenomena denoted by the words “life” and “death”, the former is correlated with something very good, goodness, the latter is correlated with something very bad, evil, misfortune; symmetrical linguistic behaviour is manifested in both lexemes in the derived values with the semantics of common evaluation and in the derived values that determine that life and death are the object of regular evaluation. In addition, the paper is the first to demonstrate that a certain ratio of positive and negative semes in the meaning of these lexemes marks the type of discourse (everyday, religious-philosophical, art criticism, artistic). As a result, it has been proved that not only the individual connotations of a word affect the development of its semantic structure, but also the pragmatic components of one lexeme from a pair of antonyms have an impact on the semantic variability of the other. Studying evaluation in the semantics of these units makes it possible to trace the dynamic processes in the semantic structures of the words, as well as common and different features in their linguistic behaviour.

Measure phrase modification in <em>name</em> adjective constructions in Mandarin

Much research has shown that measure phrases elicit an asymmetry in acceptability between positive vs. negative members of gradable adjective antonym pairs (3m tall vs. *3m short) (Kennedy 1999; Schwarzschild 2005, and others). As in other languages, the measure phrase in Mandarin yi mi ‘1 meter’ is accepted as direct modifier of gao ‘tall’ and rejected by the negative antonym ai ‘short’. However, when the adjective combines with name ‘so’, this measure phrase is accepted by both positive and negative adjectives. In addition, name adjective expressions are ambiguous between two readings. Namely, the surprise reading and the equative reading. This paper accounts for the new data with two proposals: (1) name is a presupposition filter; (2) There is a silent morpheme Vec in name adjective expressions, which is in complementary distribution with overt measure phrases.

The Discourse Functions of Antonyms in Faceless by Amma Darko

This article investigates the discourse functions of antonymy in Amma Darko’s Faceless. It also explores the principles that govern the order of antonymous pairs in Faceless. The study is motivated by an observation, based on corpus data, that certain antonymous pairs co-occur in written data, and that they perform various discourse functions. There is also the argument that certain antonymous pairs tend to be used in a preferred sequence in the sentence. Data was collected from Amma Darko’s Faceless, a novel about the plight of street children in Ghana. The authors argue that in Faceless, antonymous pairs often co-occur within one word class and that these antonym pairs function differently to highlight some of the themes of the novel. The authors also argue that in the novel, antonym sequence is influenced by the following principles: idiomaticity and non-gender, chronology and positivity. Keywords: antonymy, antonymous pair, discourse function & themes

Antonym Sequence in Qur’anic Arabic: An Emically Etiological Approach

This article etiologically examines which principles pattern and govern antonym sequences in the Qur’anic discourse and why antonymous pair members are prone to a particularly regular order in the Qur’an. To conduct a rigorous analysis, the article builds on Jones’s (2002) analytic toolkit for antonym sequence (Chapter 8, 120-137) and tests it on a dataset manually collected from the Qur’an (1420 antonymous pairs). The toolkit accounts for antonym order in language use according to sequence rules which include morphology, positivity, magnitude, chronology, gender, phonology, idiomaticity, frequency, and markedness. The results showed that most of these rules are retrievable and replicable across Qur’anic Arabic, with, however, both quantitative and qualitative variations due to the peculiarly idiosyncratic nature of the Qur’an. Given that not all these sequential rules are applicable, new ones were developed: context, end-rhyme, and distance. The general conclusion is that Qur’anic antonym sequences are ruled by rigorous principles that are sometimes overruled for teleological reasons. Keywords: Qur’anic Arabic, Antonym Sequence, Emic Typology, Etiological Approach.

“HATE AND LOVE ARE LIKE WINGS...” (OPPOSITIONS IN POETIC VOCABULARY OF DMYTRO PAVLYCHKO)

The article considers semantically opposed lexemes recorded in poetic vocabulary of Dmytro Pavlychko. The antonymic-synonymous paradigms of axiologically marked nouns of human feelings, as well as oxymoronic syntagms based on the use of emotive and evaluative lexemes, which are productive in the poet’s language are analysed. The frequency of individual author’s metaphors formed on the basis of antonymic lexemes in the poet’s linguistic and artistic picture of the world is traced, which testify to the originality of the creative worldview. The oppositions representing religious ideas of man (soul – body, spirit – body) are considered. It is noted that D. Pavlychko’s poetic idiom is characterised by the use of oxymorons, which have the form of a conjunctive phrase. Constructions in which semantically opposed lexemes are combined into one semantic and structural whole are used to create original contradictory images. It has been found that the expressiveness of linguistic contrast in D. Pavlychko’s poetic vocabulary is enhanced by the following syntactic and stylistic constructions: parcellation; opposition of opposites; transformation of opposites; constructions based on multi-stage oppositions; refrain. It is traced that antitheses in the studied texts are used mainly to create contrasting characteristics; to convey polar emotions; to emphasise the contrast between the depicted objects and phenomena of objective reality; to represent contrasting temporal and locative relations; to nominate opposed actions, etc. The author also notes poetic contexts in which semantically opposed lexemes express an ironic, sarcastic attitude to the facts and characters depicted. The antonymic pairs that form the basis of the titles or first lines of poetic works and perform an architectonic function, i.e. serve as an expression of the author’s thought in the whole poetic work, are recorded. It is found that the productivity of oppositions in Dmytro Pavlychko’s poetic vocabulary, which ensure the creation of polar images and pictures of the world around us, testifies to a multifaceted understanding of the complexity and contradictions of human life, an attempt to characterise the subject from polar sides, to convey the contrasting state of mind of the lyrical hero, to reflect his inner world i.e. the world of polar feelings and experiences.

Характеристика словосочетаний как средств синтаксического уровня вербализации концепта SAFETY в английском языке

The study aims to identify the characteristic features of the syntactic means of verbalisation of the SAFETY concept in the English language. To attain this aim, the paper identifies and characterises the possibilities of expressing ideas about safety/security discovered when transitioning from the lexical to the syntactic level of their consideration, providing the addition of meanings of the lexical units verbalising the SAFETY concept. Scientific novelty of the study lies in determining that during the transition from the lexical to the syntactic level of analysis of the linguistic means verbalising the SAFETY concept, semantic features acquire more differentiated characteristics (due to the concretisation of the means, the regulatory framework, the object and subject of safety/security; the metamorphosis of modality of the meanings of lexical units in antonymic pairs of phrases and the uncertainty of some ideas about safety/security requiring consideration of the context). As a result of the study, variable ideas about safety/security expressed by phrases the structural components of which include a lexeme verbalising the SAFETY concept and a lexeme providing the addition (expansion, narrowing, opposition) of its meaning have been determined. The expansion of primary semantic features that occurs when analysing a higher (syntactic) level of expression and transmission of ideas about safety/security by means of phrases peculiar to native English speakers has been proved.

Qualities and “Anti-Qualities” of Speech: Representation in Ideographic Dictionary

The study of speech from a communicative point of view, namely its communicatively significant qualities, the implementation of the functions of communication and influence, is important primarily in the cultural and speech aspect. Specialists have developed criteria for good speech and requirements for it (informativeness, correctness, accuracy, consistency, relevance, purity, intelligibility, richness, ethics, expressiveness). The purpose of this study is to analyze the specifics of ideas about the qualities of speech in a naive linguistic consciousness. The material of the study is the data obtained in the process of working on the project “Universal Thesaurus of the Russian Language”, which is currently being developed by specialists from the Ural Semantic School under the guidance of prof. L. G. Babenko. Materials from other explanatory and ideographic dictionaries are also used. Among the identified lexemes with the meaning of speech characteristics, first of all, those that are connected by synonymous relations, i.e. are responsible for detailing, concretizing these characteristics. In addition, both compliance and non-compliance with the requirements for good speech, i.e., both its qualities and “anti-qualities”, are marked by linguistic means, which indicates the importance of these opposing characteristics; therefore, attention is also paid to antonymic pairs and groups of words.

ACQUISITION OF THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE BY KOREAN STUDENTS (technical program students)

This article deals with traditional and modern methods, techniques of language pedagogy, connected with Russian lexicography and corpus linguistics. Contemporary tools of teaching Russian as a foreign language (new types of dictionaries, particularly ideographic and text corpuses) address issues related to unsystematic learning of the language, structuring the teaching process, enhancing students’ creativity and interests in the language. The author considers linguocultural aspect as central point of intercultural communication needed for linguistic persona development. It is reported that within language training programs for technical faculty students the following components are to be covered: gender aspects of communicative behavior reflected in verbal interaction, features of mind-set, cultural traditions of formal and informal communication. According to the author, this aim can be reached due to tasks on ranking in communication, contrastive-comparative analysis, working with lexicographic literature; texts of different styles and genres enable foreign students to learn lexical-phraseological system of the Russian language (theme groups; synonymic rows; antonymic pairs) more effectively, and pay attention to functional aspect of the language system.

Functional-semantic and expressive potential of the oxymoron in Russian poetry of the XIX century.

Abstract The present article is devoted to the study of antonyms as a stylistic device based on opposites and contradictions, the identification of means of expressiveness. The object of the study is the stylistic figure “oxymoron", considered on the material of poetry of the XIX century. The purpose of the research is to reveal and comprehend the specific essence and features of the oxymoron as a category of poetics, to identify the relationship with the verbal poetic image as a kind of absurdity and paradox. The acceptance of speech paradoxes is explained by allophrony. Special attention is paid to the structural and semantic possibilities of an antonymic pair in the context of a deliberately used speech error. The work is carried out in line with the descriptive method of linguistics. The results of our linguistic research allow us to draw some conclusions: that the linguistic phenomenon is an oxymoron, is anomalous to words with a direct meaning and is characterized in science as a paradox. The acceptance of speech paradoxes, despite the contradictions, is explained by allophrony. The increased expressiveness of the oxymoron is achieved by contrasting, opposites, a combination of epithets incomprehensible to logic, in which a vivid manifestation of feelings, moods, thoughts is expressed, it is implied as an incorrect, unfair combination of ideas in one whole, that is, as a violation, as something that does not have the right to exist in a work of art due to inconsistency, logically mutually exclusive each other even before direct interaction. The oxymoron as a phenomenon of poetic and empirical reality is used as metaphorical names of any physiological deviations in the description of heroes, anomalies in nature containing a paradox. The minimal structure of the oxymoron is a phrase, it is the result of a fusion of contrasting meanings. An adjective and a noun interact in an oxymoron, less often an adverb and a verb, a verb and a adverb, an adverb and an adjective.

ANTONYMY AS A MEANS OF PORTRAITING SOCIAL INEQUALITY IN THE DRAMATIC POEM "IN THE CATACOMBS" BY LESYA UKRAINKA

The purpose of the scientific research, the results of which are described in this article, is to identify and analyze the facts of antonymy, by using which Lesya Ukrainka creates a contractive image of social inequality between persons who are characters in the dramatic poem "In the Catacombs", and to determine the specificity of this language and artistic medium in the author's picture of the world. The object of study are lexemes and replicas that illuminate the social background of relations between representatives of the ancient Roman society during the era of persecution of Christians. The subject of this study is the functioning mechanisms of the revealed antonymic language mediums in the dramatic poem "In the Catacombs" and their role in creating the social space of this work. The methods of sociolinguistic, semantic and contrastive analysis, as well as the descriptive method, are applied. The result of the analysis is the identification of facts of artistic antonymy in the replicas of the characters, primarily the Christian bishop and the neophyte slave, in the dispute about social justice. Some conclusions were made, in particular: antonymy is the leading artistic device of the dramatic poem "In the Catacombs", by using which Lesya Ukrainka highlights the God-loving positions of people who disagree with social inequality in society and are ready to fight for social fairness; antonym pairs in the work are distinguished at the lexical, phraseological and textual levels; the main conflicting antonym pair in this poem is SLAVE ≠ FREE. Socially conditioned antonymous pairs MAN ≠ WOMAN; CHRISTIAN ≠ PAGAN; GOD / KING ≠ HUMAN also intensify the conflict.

THE SEMANTIC FEATURE ANALYSIS ON TEACHING VOCABULARY FOR YOUNG LEARNERS

ABSTRACT
 As vocabulary is a necessary mode of communication, it must be acquired first to be able to master the English language. It is a good idea to start vocabulary classes in elementary school. As their memory is still strong in remembering things, they are ready to learn anything new. However, since English is a second language, teachers will need to employ strategies to have students acquire and memorize new words. This study focuses on linguistic knowledge, that is, semantics, which the teacher uses in the classroom and the learning materials to encourage students’ vocabulary. This is a content analysis of the teacher's approaches to teaching new words to young learners using semantic aspects. This research will be observed through two videos of English-language classrooms. The findings reveal that semantic features such as synonym and antonym pairs, polysemy, and applying in short sentences were used in the classroom when teaching vocabulary. During the class, photos, cassettes, music, and a variety of other learning resources are used. These strategies motivate and encourage students to learn the new vocabulary.
 Keywords: vocabulary, instruction, young learner, semantics

ЛЕКСИКО-СЕМАНТИЧНІ ПОЛЯ СЛОВОТВІРНИХ РЯДІВ СЛІВ ІЗ СУФІКСОМ -MENT

The article outlines three lexical-semantic fields of word-formation rows with the suffix -ment. The aim of the paper is to investigate three lexical-semantic fields which consist of the lexical-semantic field denoting improvement, confinement and feelings. To achieve this aim, the following tasks should be completed such as investigating motivation relations in derived words with the suffix -ment and analyzing their structure with the help of the applicative generative model. The methods of componential and comparative analysis and the relator language of the applicative generative model were applied for fulfilling the above-mentioned tasks. To build word-formation rows, the words are segmented according to their motivation relations. Etymological aspect is not taken into account. Every field consists of lexical-semantic groups. The lexical-semantic field denoting the action of improvement consists of fifty-eight words, which are classified into seven lexical-semantic groups. This field is represented by thirteen R-structures. The lexical-semantic field of feelings includes two lexicalsemantic groups which contain six R-structures. The lexical-semantic field of confinement includes twenty-one words represented by six R-structures. Paradigmatic relations in lexical-semantic groups were analyzed in order to illustrate interfiled connections. Synonymic rows and antonymic pairs in lexical-semantic groups and hyperonyms distinguished in lexical-semantic fields prove paradigmatic relations. Lexical-semantic fields consist of nouns because the suffix -ment generates, mainly, nomina actionis. The term word-formation row is described in the paper as this notion which is a complex unit of word-formation hasn’t been studied thoroughly yet. The word-formation row in every lexicalsemantic field is highlighted in the article. The more lexical-semantic groups comprise the lexical-semantic field, the more R-structures the word-formation row has in a lexical-semantic field. Besides, this fact proves that English words with the suffix -ment are polysemous and variable. The polysemy of these words is illustrated via interfiled connections, e.g., the word fulfillment with the meaning “a feeling of satisfaction” belongs to the lexical-semantic field of feelings, and with the meaning “the act of doing smth. that you have promised or intended to do” this word can be involved in the lexical-semantic group of achievement which belongs to the lexical-semantic field of improvement. The relator language of the applicative generative model is used to investigate R-structure of English words with the suffix -ment. This analysis helps to create word-formation rows. R=rows of artificial language and L=rows of natural language are described. The research results lead to the conclusion that three lexical-semantic fields can be characterized by polysemous character of English words with the suffix -ment which are represented by interfiled connections. The variety of R-structures comprising wordformation rows shows the variativity of the investigated words and proves the idea that words may be derived not only from verbs but also nouns and adjectives. Interfield connections in three lexicalsemantic fields demonstrate that all words with the suffix -ment can be grouped into lexical-semantic fields. It can be useful and significant for linguists to create different English dictionaries. So, the aim of the further study is to arrange all existing words with the suffix -ment into lexical-semantic fields and make an attempt to create the dictionary of R-words and L=words with the suffix -ment.