Abstract for Presentation at LACUS FORUM
York University, Toronto
July 29 to August 2, 1997


Why isn't little the opposite of large? Antonymy and semantic range.

Victoria Muehleisen




Many semantic approaches to antonymy (Cruse 1986 and others) characterize antonyms as adjectives which occupy opposite ends of a shared semantic dimension. This characterization is not complete, however. For example, it cannot account for the fact that little and large are not antonyms even though they occupy opposite ends of the SIZE dimension. This paper introduces an addition to the definition of antonymy, the idea of "shared semantic range," characterized in terms of the types of nouns which an adjective typically modifies. Antonyms are shown to be adjectives which occupy opposite ends of a dimension AND are very similar in semantic range.

Following up on the observation (Lehrer and Lehrer 1982 and others) that big and large, and likewise little and small, are not perfect synonyms and so do not occur in identical contexts, I studied the semantic ranges of the four adjectives using the mutual information statistic (see Church and Hanks 1990 for more about this measure) on a large corpus to find the nouns which typically occur with these adjectives.

The results reveal significant differences in the ways in which the synonyms are used. For example, although both big and large occurred in this corpus with nouns which describe organizations (e.g., airlines, banks, corporation), large, but not big, occurred with abstract nouns that named quantities (e.g. amount, areas, degree), and large occurred with many more nouns that named physical objects (e.g. buildings, flowers, photographs). In contrast, big, but not large, occurred with abstract nouns such as advantage and fight, and big occurred in many idiomatic uses (big bang, big money) while large did not. Little and small were even more different from each other, with little occurring with very limited range of nouns, while small had the widest range of the four adjectives.

Comparing the ranges of the adjectives, antonyms are seen to have a high degree of overlap in semantic range. Small occurs with all the types of nouns that large occurred with; that is, the range of small entirely overlaps that of large, so large and small are antonyms. Likewise big occurs with all the types of nouns that little modifies, thus big and little are antonyms. The ranges of small and big also overlap to a large extent, which explains why these two adjectives are sometimes considered antonyms. However, large and little have almost no shared semantic range and thus are not antonyms.

These results suggest that shared semantic range plays an important role in antonymy; ongoing research will be mentioned showing how this concept is useful for explaining other questions about antonymy, e.g., why arid is not the antonym of wet and why happy has two antonyms, unhappy and sad.

References

Cruse, D.A. 1986. Lexical semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Church, K. and P. Hanks. 1990. Word association norms, mutual information, and lexicography. Computational Linguistics 16:22-29.

Lehrer, A. and K. Lehrer. 1982. Antonymy. Linguistics and Philosophy 5:483- 501.

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