Using contextual approach of antonyms and synonyms

In summary, antonym canonicity lies on a continuum rather than clear cut groups of ‘good’ antonyms and ‘bad’ ones (Jones et al., 2012). Highly canonical antonyms are generally very parallel in their semantic characteristics, and they are conventionalized through use. Highly canonical antonyms are recognized as antonyms out of context while pairs of antonyms lower in the canonicity scale need contextual cues to frame them as contrastive. The next section presents studies that have investigated antonyms in context.

substitution hypothesis and add that the ‘the cue for learning to associate direct antonyms is not their substitutability, but rather their relatively frequent cooccurrence in the same sentence’ (Charles and Miller, 1989: 357). Justeson and Katz (1991) used the same corpus to examine Charles and Miller’s (1989) cooccurrence hypothesis. Their findings supported the co-occurrence hypothesis, but they added that antonymous adjectives tend to co-occur in the same sentences in contexts where each antonym could be grammatically substituted for the other.Fellbaum (1995) also used the Brown corpus to investigate antonymous pairs from different word classes, and found that semantically opposed words from different word classes, such as the noun life and the verb die, co-occur at high rates. Therefore, she claims that antonymy is a property of concepts (which can be realized in different word classes) rather than words. Fellbaum (1995) describes the syntactic structures where antonyms co-occurred and presents these syntactic structures as a possible explanation for the cooccurrence of antonyms in context. Some of the frames she found include ‘X and Y’ as in all creatures great and small, ‘X or Y’ as in a matter of life or death, and ‘from X to Y’ as in from the first to the last (Fellbaum, 1995: 295). These syntactic frames can be filled by contrasting nouns, verbs, or adjectives. However, some verb-verb pairs do not have the same arguments or the same syntactic form, as in (13); and some noun-noun pairs do not agree in number and some occur in different syntactic environments. In sentence (13), ending is a gerund while began is a verb in the past tense.

The couple were married last Saturday, thus ending a friendship that began in their schooldays. (Fellbaum, 1995: 292)Mettinger (1994) conducted the first systematic study on antonymous pairs and identified grammatical frames hosting antonyms. He analysed 350 pairs of antonyms taken from the 1972 edition of Roget’s Thesaurus and 350 pairs from a corpus of novels (Mettinger, 1994: 2). He divided his data into two groups. The first group comprises 61.5% of the antonym pairings in his data. This group included the antonym pairs that were classifiable into categories. These categories were labelled according to their functions: simultaneous validity, cumulative validity, confrontation, choice, retrospective correction, comparison, mutation, and reversal. The remaining 38.5% of his data were unclassifi able and were labelled as instances of cohesion where ‘the context stresses the contrast constituted by the juxtaposition of X and Y’ (Mettinger, 1994: 41).These studies show how research on antonymy shifted from being introspective based on intuition to more pragmatic approaches using corpus methodology that show antonym pairs as used in context. From here, I focus more on Jones (2002) and explain the methodology he used and his classification of antonym functions in text. I move then to Davies (2013) to highlight differences and similarities between his study and Jones’s. I focus on these two studies because the classification presented in this thesis builds on their work. After that, studies on antonym functions in other languages are reviewed before I end this section.

Table 2.1: Jones’s (2002) grammatical frames hosting canonical antonyms antonymycategor grammaticalframe AncillaryAntony nospecificframe CoordinatedAnto

X and Y; X or Y X but Y nm

ComparativeAnt more X than Y X rather than Y

DistinguishedAn the difference between X and Y

TransitionalAntofrom X to Y turning X to Y

NegatedAntony X not Y; X instead of Y X as

ExtremeAntony the very X and the very Y either

IdiomaticAntony (idiomaticexpressions)

Ancillary antonymy : multi-contrast sentences where the antonymous pair helps to signal another less obvious contrast in the sentence. For ex: There is no doubt that the legal department was right and the social workers wrong .

Comparative antonymy : the antonyms are weighted relative to one another. Sometimes I feel more masculine than feminine and I don’t like it.

Distinguished antonymy : when the distinction beween the two antonyms is explicit, usually indicating a difference , gap , or division between them. God has given us the ability to distinguish between right and wrong and to shoulder responsibility.

Transitional antonymy: the sentences express a change on the scale designated by the antonymous pair. He turns bad ball into good ball and invariably makes the right decisions.

Oppositional antonymy: sentences on the form X, not Y. For a while, no one would buy any cheese made with unpasteurised milk, despite the fact that listeria cases were caused by soft, not hard cheeses. The co-occurrence of antonyms can signal many different functions. We can conclude that there are many reasons for words in general and antonyms in particular to co-occur.

Idiomatic antonymy : the antonymous pair takes part in an idiom.

The same ability to blow hot and cold was also displayed in August when he invited journalists for a friendly get-together on a Hong Kong beach. Effect of parallelism on creating a secondary opposition in the sentence. They examined both semantic and formal parallelism in addition to the connective used between the two parallel parts. Their findings supported Jones’s finding that formal parallelism diminishes the need for a contrastive connector. Their findings also confirm their hypothesis that lexically related words in B-pair position reduce the need for contrastive connectives even further.

The second category in Jones’s categories is Coordinated Antonymy where the antonym pair ‘signal[s] inclusiveness or exhaustiveness of scale’ (Jones, 2002: 75). The two major frames in this category are ‘X and Y’ as in He took success and failure in his stride (Jones, 2002: 64); and ‘X or Y’ as in Yet, win or lose , he could fade faster than Donny Osmond (Jones, 2002: 66).Ancillary Antonymy and Coordinated Antonymy are the two largest categories in Jones’s classification with almost the same percentage, 38.7% for Ancillary Antonymy and 38.4% for speech.

They     found     that     the     two     classes     of     Ancillary

Coordinated Antonymy. Jones et al. (2012) compared the discourse functions found in six corpora from previous research: adult-produced writing in English, Swedish, and Japanese; English adult-produced speech; English child-produced speech; and English child-directed Antonymy and Coordinated Antonymy are the most dominant of the discourse functions in all theseThe other six classes are called minor classes by Jones. The sentences in (14) are examples of each minor category in Jones’s classification.

• (12)    a. Small monk tails are cheaper than large ones. (ComparativeAntonymy; Jones, 2002: 78)

• b.    The difference on grain imports between fast and slow economic growth... (DistinguishedAntonymy; Jones, 2002: 81)

• c.    The mood in both camps swung from optimism to pessimism. (TransitionalAntonymy; Jones, 2002: 85)

• d.    The public has cause for pessimism, not optimism, about the Government plans. (NegatedAntonymy; Jones, 2002: 88)

• e.    Nothing, it seemed, was too large or too small for Mr. Al-Fayed. (Extreme Antonymy; Jones, 2002: 92)

Comparative Antonymy constitutes only 6.8% of Jones’s (2002) dataset. This category includes sentences with antonyms put in comparison to each other such as the one in (14a). In this sentence, small/large monk tails are compared against each other. The category Distinguished Antonymy (5.4%) includes sentences with an explicit distinction between pairs of antonyms. The sentence in (14b) is one of the examples Jones provides for this category. Transitional Antonymy (3%) presents a shift or movement from one antonym’s meaning to the other as in sentence (14c) above. Negated Antonymy (2.1%) is used to affirm a word’s meaning by negating its opposite. This use dominates in spoken discourse more than in written text (Jones et al., 2012). Examples of Negated Antonymy include sentence (14d) above. In Extreme Antonymy, the structures are similar to Coordinated Antonymy. The difference is that there is a comparison between the far two ends of the scale expressed by the antonym pair, such as in sentence (14e). The last category in the minor classes is Idiomatic Antonymy. This category includes sentences where the antonym pair is used as a part of ‘a familiar idiom, proverb, or cliche’ (Jones, 2002: 93).

Contextual synonym

In this paper, we define words that are not synonymous with each other in semantics, but are synonymously used in certain specific texts as contextual synonyms. For the sake of a clearer contrast between contextual synonym and the term “synonym” commonly used, in this paper, we redefine words that are semantically synonymous as semantic synonyms. There are some obvious, important differences between contextual synonyms and semantic synonyms, which we should make clear.

The relationships of two-word pairs can represent the characteristics of the relationships between multi-word groups. To simplify our discussion, we discuss only the relationships of two-word pairs in the following analyses. Words that might be used as contextual synonyms should have, between each other, one of the three semantic relationships discussed as follows. There are two typical different types of word groups which take this relationship between each other. One type is that W2 refers to a collective group of something, while W1 refers to an individual division in that group. This is exemplified by “bird” and “sparrow”, “fruit” and “apple”. This type is usually known as “hyponymy” by many linguists2. W2 is called a superordinate term or an upper term, and W1 is called a hyponym, a subordinate term or a lower term. This type of relationship can be more clearly illustrated by hierarchical tree-diagram. Figure 2 is an example of this.

The other type is that W2 refers to a whole composed of W1 and some others. This is exemplified by “body”and “arm”, “head” and “nose”. W1 is a part of W2. This type is also known as a part-whole relation (Lyons, 1977). For nouns, we can say that “W1 is a part of W2” if they are in the part-whole relation, whereas we can say “W1 is a kind of W2” if they are in the hyponymy relation. a) A sparrow is a kind of bird. (but not “a sparrow is a part of bird”) b) An arm is a part of body. (but not “an arm is a kind of body”)

The second type of word groups cannot be used as contextual synonyms. In synecdoche, we can use W1/W2 to replace W2/W1, as is the case in the following examples:

• (a)    He has many mouths to feed in his family. (mouths= people)

• (b)    The birds sang to welcome the smiling year. (the smiling year= springtime)

In some texts, the meanings of both W1 and W2 are broadened, and as a result, their intersected part is enlarged. Or the meaning of either word is broadened and their intersected part is also enlarged. When used as contextual synonyms, they both refer to the expanded intersected part. The words “shy” and “nervous”

are usually intersected in the fact that they both can imply a kind of uneasiness in the presence of other people. But in example (g), their intersected part is obviously much enlarged.

• (g) She is a shy girl and she is nervous among a group of boys.

In spite of this, in the case of synecdoche, W1 and W2 are usually not used in the same text.The first type of word groups can be used as contextual synonyms. In this case, the word with general meaning, i.e. W2 is specified to the same meaning as W1. In the text where W1 and W2 are used as contextual synonyms, they are used interchangeably. A typical example is the words “participant” and “negotiator” in a text which discusses negotiation skills. The upper term “participant” is defined as “a person who participates a negotiation” and is used as a contextual synonym of “negotiator”, as is the case in example (e):

• a) For a successful agreement, participants need to know negotiation principles and tactics.... at the beginning of the negotiation, the negotiators should know well their desired results and not to be willfully manipulated by their counterparts.

3. Conclusion

Usually, if we need to use W1 and W2 of this type as contextual synonyms, we cannot broaden the meaning of W1 to the same meaning of W2. For example, we cannot generalize “college students” to refer to “all kinds ofstudents”; however, we can specify “students” to refer only to “college students”. This shows us the fact that if an upper term and a lower term are used as contextual synonyms, their synonymous meaning can only be the meaning of the lower term and the meaning of the upper term should be specified in the same meaning of the lower term.

the members of each row are gathered around one same. Several Uzbek linguists have investigated on the issue of contextual antonyms and synonyms:

its features, its similarity and difference from other linguistic notions. Besides, as it was mentioned above, it was proved that synonyms are a universal linguistic phenomenon that can be felt in any linguistic layer (phonological, morphological, syntactical, stylistic, lexical, phraseological, etc.) of a language.

We have so far discussed the three basic semantic relationships between contextual synonyms and antonyms. Yet, we have to point out:Words which are not synonymous or antonymous with each other in semantics can be used as contextual synonyms and antonyms under one of the conditions above discussed;These conditions are only requirements for contextual synonyms and antonyms.Words meeting these requirements may not be necessarily used as contextual synonyms and antonyms.