Definition - Canonical Antonyms
Over the years, linguists have proposed variopus definitions of antonyms. In the SPECIALIST Lexicon, antonyms are classified as canonical anotnyms. Below are the definitions of antonyms and canonical antonyms:
I. Antonyms
Antonyms are words with opposite or contrasting meanings. [1997 Kempson] [1986 Cruse] [2011 Paradis & Willners] [2015 Paradis]. Interestingly, antonyms are not simply words with entirely different meanings. Instead, they are words that are similar in some respects but differ in a key way, often representing opposite ends of the same spectrum. For instance, consider the word “king.” Is its antonym “queen,” “peasant,” or “president”? The answer depends on the specific dimension of contrast, such as gender or social status. Each of these dimensions defines its own set of antonyms.
A key rule of antonymy is that opposites are logically incompatible. If something can be described by one member of an antonym pair, it cannot be described by the other. For example, if a person is alive, they cannot also be dead. Kempson (1977) describes opposites as word pairs with a "binary incompatible relation," meaning one word's presence excludes the other. Thus, "giant" and "dwarf" are opposites, but "giant" and "person" are not.
Manually-created lexicons focus on clear opposites like “hot” and “cold” but often overlook pairs with a lesser degree of contrast, such as “warm” and “cold” or “tropical” and “freezing.” This leads to the contrast hypothesis ([2013 Mohammad]): if two words, A and B, are contrasting, there exists a pair of opposites, C and D, such that A is strongly related to C, and B is strongly related to D. For example, “tropical” relates to “hot,” and “freezing” relates to “cold,” making “tropical” and “freezing” contrasting words.
II. Canonical Antonyms
Antonyms in the SPECIALIST Lexicon (LexAntonyms) are classified as canonical antonyms, as noted by Murphy (2003) and Paradis (2009). Canonical antonyms are words that possess opposite or contrasting meanings within a generic domain that is central to human life and experiences across different cultures and historical periods. In our practice, we identify 11 such generic domains.
The concept of canonicity is employed to assess the quality of antonym pairs (Murphy, 2003). Canonical antonyms are characterized by clearly opposable pairs that express opposite properties along fundamental dimensions that are significant to human life and ways of living, such as color, space, temperature, and wealth.
These canonical antonym pairs form a part of an antonym canon acquired through language experience. The focus is on the meanings and usages that support antonym canonicity, rather than on formal properties like morphology or orthography (Murphy, 2003).
Examples of Canonical Antonyms:
| Ant-1 | Ant-2 | Dimension | Domain (in the Lexicon) |
|---|---|---|---|
| black | white | color | physical_property |
| hot | cold | temperature | temperature |
| dead | alive | existence | quality |
| short | long | length | size |
| slow | fast | speed | DOMAIN_NONE |
| slow | quick | time | temporal |
Non-canonical antonyms: These are pairs that are less distinctly opposable. The dimensions associated with non-canonical antonyms tend to be more focused on specific nominal meaning domains. For example, while the adjective "dark" can be considered an antonym of "white," this pairing is not always apparent unless we are discussing specific contexts, such as chocolate—where it makes sense—but not when referring to coffee.
Examples of Non-canonical Antonyms:
| Ant-1 | Ant-2 | Dimension |
|---|---|---|
| white | dark | chocolate |
| hot | iced | tea, coffee |
| dry | fleshy | fruit |
In pratice, both WordNet and the Lexicon provide lists of antonyms. In WordNet, "mushroom" and "toadstool" are categorized as antonyms because they share the same part of speech (noun) and are potentially contrastive regarding edibility (nonpoisonous vs. poisonous). However, they do not meet the criteria for antonyms in the Lexicon. Firstly, "mushroom" and "toadstool" can also be considered synonyms (as a “toadstool” is a type of “mushroom”), which disqualifies them as antonyms (Weijer et al., 2012; Tesfaye & Paradis, 2015). Additionally, antonyms in the Lexicon must be canonical antonyms and universally contrast along a generic domain, such as size, location, or time (Lu et al., 2020). Since edibility is not considered a generic domain, the contrast between "mushroom" and "toadstool" is not universal enough to be classified as antonymic.
III. References
Please refer to original design documents