ANTONYMY AND SYNONYMY
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Dongxue Qin
Colorado State University
English Antonymy and Synonymy
Lexical semantics starts with recognizing a word which is “a conventional association
between a lexicalized concept and an utterance that plays a syntactic role” (Miller & Fellbaum,
1991, p. 199). According to Miller & Fellbaum (1991), to consider the definition of word, there
are three classes of considerations: (1) “What kinds of utterances enter into lexical associations?”
(2) “What is the nature and organization of the lexical concepts that the words can express?” (3)
“What syntactic roles do different words play?” (p. 199). In their study, they use “word form” to
represent an utterance, and “word meaning” to refer to lexical concept. People don’t recognize a
word by separating its meaning and form. For example, if a person knows the word money,
she/he cannot see or hear money without thinking about its meaning. Words in the lexicon are
related to each other by such important semantic relations as synonymy, hyponymy, antonymy,
meronymy.
English is considered one of the richest of all the languages in the world (Gupta, 2005). It
has a huge vocabulary and the most synonyms and antonyms of all the languages known to
humans (Gupta, 2005). A synonym is a word which has an identical, similar or equivalent
meaning to another word. In Miller & Fellbaum’s study (1991), synonymy makes two
expressions relatively based on a context where substitutions do not change the meanings.
It is surprisingly difficult to define antonym. Though an antonym is a word which is
opposite in meaning which means the antonym of the word X is not-X, it is not always true, for
example, rich and poor are antonyms, however, if you say someone is not rich, it doesn’t mean
she/he is poor because people could think them neither rich nor poor.
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Based on what was talked about above, this paper will discuss: (1) classes of antonymy (2)
near synonyms (3) antonymy and synonymy in adjectives.
Classes of Antonymy
Jones (2007) identified seven classes of antonymy based on four different discourse
functions in corpora which include Adult-Produced Writing (APW) using a corpus of
Independent newspaper data (October 1988 to December 1996), Adult-Produced Speech (APS)
using the spoken component of the British National Corpus, Child-Produced Speech (CPS) and
Child-Directed Speech (CDS) both using selected corpora from the CHILDES database.
1. Transitional Antonymy
In discourse, antonyms make “a shift or movement from one statement to another” by
using one as a starting-point transition and another one as a ending-point transition (Jones, 2007,
p. 1112). The typical frame for this antonymy is from X to Y.
1a. It’s quite clear that what this is about is actually what it is happening in
housing in general and that is shifting provision from the pri, from the public
to the private sector (APS).
1b. The man stood up then fell down in the water (CPS).
2. Negated Antonymy
Negated antonymy is a word “affirmed by the denial of its antonym” in which denying
can happen before the positive antonym or after it (Jones, 2007, p.1112). The example 2a is the
negated antonym in which denying follow the positive antonym, and the example 2b is the
negated antonym in which denying happens before the positive antonym.
2a. The manager of one of the bars taking part in the teach-in said all his boys
were straight, not gay (APW).
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2b. That’s not making it clean, that’s making it dirty (CDS)
3. Comparative Antonymy
In this category, antonyms are expressed in comparison with another, in which the
typical frame is X is more adjective than Y (Jones, 2007). The example 3a and 3b show the two
different frameworks of comparative antonymy:
3a. I am worth more dead than alive (APS).
3b. Because boy kitties are easier to hold than girl kitties (CPS).
4. Idiomatic Antonymy
Antonyms sometimes occur in well-known sayings, proverbs in part because
antonyms can rhyme when they are put together (Jones, 2007). The examples below show how
idiomatic antonymy works in sentences:
4a. The critical point is that banks are understandably reluctant to throw good
money after bad (APW).
4b. Come on we’ll search high and low (CDS).
5. Interrogative Antonymy
In questions, antonyms are considered as coordinated when they mark
“exhaustiveness of scale conjoined by and or or” (Jones, 2007, p. 1113). However, when
antonyms are conjoined by or, but the purpose of the question is to invite a choice rather than to
signal “exhaustiveness of scale” (p. 1114). Therefore, Jones (2007) separated this kind of
antonymy as interrogative antonymy.
5a. Those your new ones or your old ones? (APS)
5b. Do you love your pen or do you hate your pen? (CPS)
6. Distinguished Antonymy
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Some utterances “refer explicitly to the semantic distinction between a pair of words”
(Jones, 2007, p. 1114), therefore, the typical framework of distinguished antonymy is N between
X and Y, in which N is difference.
6a. When I accused Greenbaum of being pedantically non-prescriptive, he
denied the charge, maintaining that the book clearly differentiates between
correct and incorrect (APW).
6b. I think sometimes, and I am not saying there’s any difference between
male and female as far as that’s concerned, but I think its a way of your,
getting your er aggression out (APS).
7. Extreme Antonymy
Extreme antonymy is “the two end-points of the scale which are united and set up in
opposition against its central points” (Jones, 2007, p. 1114). The typical framework is (adverb) X
or (adverb) Y, where the adverb signals the extremity such as too and perfectly.
7a. It was a pressure shot…. too soft or too hard and I had no chance of
making the birdie (APW).
7b. But they will experience those feelings, because human nature is not
at either of these extreme points, it’s neither erm, perfectly good, nor
perfectly bad, it’s a, it’s a mixture of both (APS).
Antonymy and Synonymy in Adjectives
Prototypically, antonyms are “gradable adjectives that stand in contrariety on some
dimensions, for example, hot-cold, tall-short, soft-hard (Lyons, 1977, p. 302). According to
Lehrer & Lehrer (1982), antonyms are two terms that represent the same distance from a neutral
point of the meaning. For example, hot is the opposite of cold rather than warm because hot and
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cold share the same neutral point of temperature. In addition, in order to maintain the same
distance from the neutral point, if one adjective use an intensified term, then the opposite of the
adjectives should use intensified term as well, such as very hot and very cold.
However, not every word has an opposite. “Words have opposites only if one dimension of
their meaning is particularly salient” (Murphy, 1993, p. 302). For example, the word chair has
no obvious antonym. There are some possibilities such as table which are similar to chair in
many aspects, but they are not considered as good antonyms because they don’t have clear
opposite values (Murphy, 1993). Also, every adjective doesn’t have a good opposite even though
they are defined by particular values in some dimensions. The word hot is the opposite of the
word cold certainly, however, there is no good opposite of the word lukewarm. In this case,
Murphy (1993) proposes the concept of near-antonym. Gross (1989) showed that experimental
subjects can distinguish those indirect antonyms (near-antonyms), nevertheless, he found that it
is even more difficult to verify near-antonyms than direct antonyms.
Gross and Miller (1990) also proposed that adjectives cannot have the same classification as
nouns, because “the semantic organization of adjectives is entirely different from that of nouns.
Nothing like the hyponymic relation is available for adjectives: it is not clear what it would mean
to say that one adjective is a kind of some other adjectives” (Gross & Miller, 1990, p. 266).
WordNet, an online dictionary designed to reflect the organization of memory and to be useful
for real-world tasks, is organized by synonym sets, however, the basic semantic relation is
antonymy (Gross & Miller, 1990). Some words which have similar meanings in certain
dimensions don’t have exactly the same antonyms. For example, if high and lofty are considered
as in one synonym set, they should have the same antonym. In fact, the antonym of high is low,
but the antonym of lofty is base. Gross and Miller (1989) gave these kind of words the name
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“intransitive antonyms”, I.E., words are synonyms but have different antonyms. Taking big,
large, little and small as examples, large and big are regarded as synonyms, and their antonyms
are little and small respectively.
Gross and Miller (1990) also mention that though antonyms are generally opposite due to
their meaning, other factors affect whether they are good antonyms. For example, big and small
are considered good antonyms. One factor they argued is that a word can be eliminated from
being a good antonym if there is a better word. For instance, if there is no word little, then small
would be considered as a good antonym of the word large (Gross & Miller, 1990). The second
factor is that “judgments of antonymy may not be based purely upon meaning” (Murphy, 1993,
p. 305), because they differ in register or style. For example, big and large are not
“intersubstitutable” in register or style. Big is less formal than large, therefore, big can be used in
baby talk, but it will be more appropriate to use large in a formal context. Thus, from a semantic
point of view, big and large, big and small are synonyms and antonyms respectively, but they are
also different from each other in register and style (Gross & Miller, 1990).
Near Synonymy
it’s difficult to define synonymy. On one hand, if synonyms are the words that have exactly
same meaning, it is rare in any language. On the other hand, if synonyms are words which have
merely similar meaning, then most of two words can be regarded as synonyms at some level of
granularity (Edmonds, 1999). As with the antonyms discussed above, it is rare to have perfect
synonyms, while near synonyms are numerous, that is, words similar in meaning, but distributed
differently (Taylor, 2002). According to Lyons (1968), “perfect” or “full” synonyms, I.E., “the
words that have exactly the same meaning do not exist, if they do, they are extremely rare” (p.
448). Also, Bolinger (1977, p. 1) argued that “if two ways of saying something differ in their
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words or their arrangement they will also differ in meaning”. Moreover, Bloomfield (1933)
mentioned a fundamental assumption that “each linguistic form has a constant and specific
meaning” (p. 145). Therefore, if the forms of words are different, then their meaning are also
supposed to be different. Quine (1990) proposed that perfect synonymy is impossible, two words
“cannot have exactly the same use, for when we use one we are not using the other. One wants to
say rather that they have the same meaning if use of the one in place of the other does not make
any relevant difference. The question of sameness of meaning, then, comes down to the question
what to count as relevant difference.” (as cited in Taylor, 2002, p. 131). Goodman (1952)
concluded that there are no two words could have the same extension because there is always a
context in which the two words are not synonymous. “Natural languages abhor absolute
synonyms just as nature abhors a vacuum, because the meanings of words are constantly
changing” (Cruse, 1986, p. 270).
The words we encounter frequently in our life are near synonyms. According to Cruse
(1986), one characteristic of near synonyms is that near synonyms contain “a low degree of
contrastiveness” (p. 266). For example, someone could say this water is warm while one could
deny it and say this water is hot, therefore, warm and hot are not synonyms in this case. In
addition, near synonyms cannot be interchangeable in all contexts, because there is also a
preference for one word than the other (Cruse, 1986). For example, people prefer use a big
problem rather than a large problem, however, people prefer a large amount of money rather
than a big amount of money. There are numerous pairs of words in this characteristic: little/small,
high/tall, start/begin, stop/finish, motor/engine, and so on.
In Edmonds’ study (1999), he defined near-synonymy by using “granularity of
representation of word meaning” (p. 21). There are two levels of granularity: fine-grained
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representation which is subtle and coarse-grained representation which is crude. If you consider
a set of words from general definition, you only could see the words’ coarse-grained feature, in
which if they are the same, then they are synonyms. However, if you see these words from
specific contexts, their meaning will be more subtle and different which is fine-grained
representation. After discussion in his study, he finally gave the definition of near-synonymy:
“Near-synonyms are words that are alike in essential (language-neutral) meaning, or denotation,
but possibly different in terms of only peripheral traits, whatever they may be” (Edmonds, 1999,
p. 22).
Near-synonyms vary according to different aspects of their meaning (Edmonds, 1999).
Based on Cruse (1986)’s four broad categories of meaning:
1. Propositional, or denotational, meaning
2. Expressive meaning, including affect, emotion, and attitude
3. Stylistic meaning, including dialect and register
4. Presupposed meaning, leading to selectional and collocational restrictions
and Gove’s (1973, p. 25) classifications of synonyms:
1. Implications: mostly minor ideas involved in the meaning of the word;
2. Connotations: the idea which color the meaning and are the product of various
influences, such as etymology, language of origin;
3. Applications: the restrictions in a word’s use as prescribed by idiom or in
accordance with the nature of the other words with which it may be associated.
Edmonds (1999) combined these two classifications into four differentiations of nearsynonyms: collocational and syntactic variation, stylistic variation including dialect and register,
expressive variation including emotive and attitudinal aspects, and denotational variation.
1. Collocational and syntactic variation
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Near-synonyms vary in how they combine with other words in the context. There are four
co-occurrence patterns under this category: selectional restrictions, lexical collocations,
grammatical collocations and idioms.
Selectional restrictions are considered “a direct consequence of the denotation of words”
(Edmond, 1999, p. 27), for example, the agent of the word eat has to be an animate object, which
cannot be an inanimate object because of the denotation of eat. Some collocations are arbitrary,
however, some are not. For instance, Cruse (1986) says “a customer typically acquires something
physical, whereas a client typically receives a less tangible service, therefore, bakers, shoe-shops
and stores have customers, while architects and lawyers have clients” (p. 216).
2. Stylistic variation
Style is “created through the subtle variation of what is said, the words used to say it, and
the syntactic constructions employed” (DiMarco & Hirst, 1993, p. 452), and also style is an
essential part of meaning. In Edmonds’ study (1999), he discussed style in two areas: dialect and
tone.
There are three ways to talk about dialects: 1. Geographical dialects which are the dialects
assign a different word to the same thing, but not exactly substitutable, for example, “A
Canadian speaking of a loch in Scotland would be incorrect to call it a lake, and a Canadian lake
should not be called a loch” (Edmonds, 1999, p. 29) 2. Temporal dialects related with the current
words. 3. Social dialects which are related with social classes, and age of speakers. Edmonds
(1999) also mentioned borrowed words, if a borrowed word can replace a native word, then it
will be considered a near-synonym. Tone is associated with contexts or situations in language
usage, Edmonds (1999) discussed seven classifications of tones: formality (died→passed away),
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force (important→critical), concreteness (name→Judy), floridity (request→solicitation),
euphemism (toilet→restroom), familiarity (smirk→smile) and simplicity (hound→dog).
3. Expressive variation
Words can express feelings, emotions, opinions and attitudes. According to Edmonds
(1999), there are two main categories of expressive variation: 1. words can express the emotions
and feelings of speakers, 2. words can express opinions and attitudes of a participant in the
situation. Generally, adjectives convey attitude to the participant, like beautiful, ugly; nouns refer
to the participant in the situation, like car, bus; verbs express their agents, like laugh, cry.
4. Denotational variation
Edmonds (1999) mentioned that denotational variation is the most complex variation in
near-synonymy. Because “near-synonyms differ with respect to any concept or idea” (p. 33), and
also they can be different in the way they are conveyed, such as emphasis, strength and
necessity. Therefore, “a concept that is said to be denoted by a word in the traditional sense of
‘denotation’ is not always a necessary implication of using that word” (p. 33).
Conclusion
Antonymy and synonymy are two areas containing large vocabulary in all languages, and
English is no exception. it is rare to have absolute synonyms and antonyms in languages.
Therefore, near-synonyms and near-antonyms are discussed in the paper. According to
Edmonds’ study (1999), it divided near-synonymy into four different categories which are based
on Cruse (1986) and Gove (1973)’s work. Also, Jones (2007) discussed seven different
antonyms. It is worthy to discuss and understand antonymy and synonymy better for English
teachers because English learners will encounter a large amount of vocabulary within antonymy
and synonymy.
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