Opposite
In lexical semantics, opposites are words lying in an inherently incompatible binary relationship. For example, something that is even entails that it is not odd. It is referred to as a 'binary' relationship because there are two members in a set of opposites. The relationship between opposites is known as opposition. A member of a pair of opposites can generally be determined by the question: "What is the opposite of X"
The term antonym is commonly taken to be synonymous with opposite, but antonym also has other more restricted meanings. Graded antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite and which lie on a continuous spectrum. Complementary antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite but whose meanings do not lie on a continuous spectrum. Relational antonyms are word pairs where opposite makes sense only in the context of the relationship between the two meanings. These more restricted meanings may not apply in all scholarly contexts, with Lyons defining antonym to mean gradable antonyms, and Crystal warning that antonymy and antonym should be regarded with care.
General discussion
Opposition is a semantic relation in which one word has a sense or meaning that negates or, in terms of a scale, is distant from a related word. Some words lack a lexical opposite due to an accidental gap in the language's lexicon. For instance, while the word "devout" has no direct opposite, it is easy to conceptualize a scale of devoutness, where "devout" lies at the positive end with a missing counterpart at the negative end. In certain cases, opposites can be formed with prefixes like "un-" or "non-," with varying levels of naturalness. For example, "undevout" is found in Webster's 1828 dictionary, while the prefix pattern of "non-person" could theoretically extend to "non-platypus."Conversely, some words appear to be derived from a prefix suggesting opposition, yet the root term does not exist. An example is "inept," which seems to be "in-" + *"ept," although the word "ept" itself does not exist. Such words are known as unpaired words.
Opposites may be viewed as a special type of incompatibility. Words that are incompatible create the following type of entailment :
An example of an incompatible pair of words is cat : dog:
This incompatibility is also found in the opposite pairs fast : slow and stationary : moving, as can be seen below:
It's fast entails It's not slow
Cruse identifies some basic characteristics of opposites:
- binarity, the occurrence of opposites as a lexical pair
- inherentness, whether the relationship may be presumed implicitly
- patency, the quality of how obvious a pair is
Some classes of opposites include:
- antipodals, pairs of words which describe opposite ends of some axis, either literal or figurative or abstract
- disjoint opposites, members of a set which are mutually exclusive but which leave a lexical gap unfilled, such as "red" and "blue", "one" and "ten", or "Monday" and "Friday".
- reversives, pairs of verbs which denote opposing processes, in which one is the reverse of the other. They are performed by the same or similar subject without requiring an object of the verbs, such as "rise" and "fall", "accelerate" and "decelerate", or "shrink" and "grow".
- converses, pairs in which one describes a relationship between two objects and the other describes the same relationship when the two objects are reversed, such as parent and child, teacher and student, or buy and sell.
- overlapping antonyms, a pair of comparatives in which one, but not the other, implies the positive:
- * An example is "better" and "worse". The sentence "x is better than y" does not imply that x is good, but "x is worse than y" implies that x is bad. Other examples are "faster" and "slower" and "dirtier" and "cleaner". The relationship between overlapping antonyms is often not inherent, but arises from the way they are interpreted most generally in a language. There is no inherent reason that an item be presumed to be bad when it is compared to another as being worse, but English speakers have combined the meaning semantically to it over the development of the language.
Types of antonyms