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 (where
X is a given word and
Y is a different word incompatible with word X): : sentence
A is X entails sentence
A is not Y An example of an incompatible pair of words is
cat : dog: : ''It's a cat
entails It's not a 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'' :''It's stationary
entails It's not moving'' Cruse (2004) 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
planned languages abundantly use such devices to reduce vocabulary multiplication.
Esperanto has
mal- (compare
bona = "good" and
malbona = "bad"),
Damin has
kuri- (
tjitjuu "small",
kuritjitjuu "large") and
Newspeak has
un- (as in
ungood, "bad"). Some classes of opposites include: •
antipodals, pairs of words which describe opposite ends of some axis, either literal (such as "left" and "right", "up" and "down", "east" and "west") or figurative or abstract (such as "first" and "last", "beginning" and "end", "entry" and "exit") •
disjoint opposites (or "incompatibles"), 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 (or may be) performed by the same or similar subject(s) without requiring an object of the verbs, such as "rise" and "fall", "accelerate" and "decelerate", or "shrink" and "grow". •
converses (or
relational opposites or
relational antonyms), 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" ("fast" is implied but not "slow") and "dirtier" and "cleaner" ("dirty" is implied but not "clean"). 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 (it could be "less good"), but English speakers have combined the meaning semantically to it over the development of the language. == Types of antonyms ==