Linguistics An Essential Introduction

We often speak of synonyms as being words that “mean the same thing”. A more rigorous definition is that two words are synonymous (for a specific sense of each word) if substituting one word for the other does not change the meaning of a sentence. For example, we can substitute the word frightened with scared in the following sentence:

Since the two sentences have the same meaning, we can say that frighten is a synonym of scare.

Complete synonymy is rare, however — some linguists would even say that it does not exist at all. Even for senses that seem truly equivalent in meaning, there are often differences in usage that suggest some difference between them. For example, tall and high, which both have the sense ‘extends a long way from the bottom to the top when it is upright’ as one of their senses, can be substituted with each other in (2a), but not in (2b):

We often speak of antonyms as being words that mean the “opposite” of each other. But what do we mean by “opposite”? We obviously do not mean “as different as possible”. As noted above, the meaning of big is very different from the meanings of alive or yellow, but neither of these words is an antonym of big. When we say that big is the opposite of small, or that dead is the opposite of alive, we mean that they express different values of the same property or attribute. Big and small are different values of the property ‘size’, while dead and alive express different values of the property ‘vitality’. So two words which are antonyms actually share most aspects of their meaning, and differ only with respect to the value of one particular property.

The term antonym actually covers several different sense relations, whose differences correspond to differences in the nature of the property or attribute whose values they express. We will look at four commonly recognized types of antonymy.

Gradable antonyms (also called scalar antonyms) express opposite ends of a scale. Examples are big and small, hot and cold, or easy and difficult. If we replace one member of a gradable antonym pair with the other in a sentence, then only one of the sentences can be true:

If (3a) is true, then (3b) must be false and vice versa. However, they could both be false. It is possible (and natural) to say something like (3c):

There are many values between the opposite ends of a scalar property that typically have corresponding intermediate words, for example, warm, tepid, cool pick out points somewhere between hot and cold on the temperature scale.

We can use gradable antonyms to talk about different degrees of the property they name:

Complementary or simple antonym pairs exhaust the possible values that a particular property or attribute has, that is, they name discrete values. Examples are alive/dead, on/off, or inside/outside. As was the case with gradable antonyms, if we replace one member of a complementary antonym pair with the other in a sentence, then only one of the sentences can be true:

However, unlike in the case of gradable antonyms, they cannot both be false: It sounds odd, for example, to say the following:

This is because there are no intermediate points between the opposites: a person is either alive or dead, a switch is either on or off, you are either inside or outside a particular room, etc.

A significant challenge in identifying simple antonyms is the fact that language users sometimes use them like gradable antonyms. For example, they might use (5c) if Johnny is a zombie — zombies are often described as being undead, implying that they are not dead but not really alive either.

However, the gradable use of simple antonyms is typically possible only if we do not use them strictly literally. They will also not behave like gradable antonyms in all linguistic contexts. For example, the expressions in (6a) seem natural at least in some contexts, but the expressions in (6b) to (6f) seem odd under any circumstances:

As we saw earlier, for true gradable antonyms, all of these patterns are normally fully acceptable.

Converse antonyms (or relational antonyms) refer to entities in an asymmetric relation, e.g. parent/child, above/below, buy/sell. As in the case of gradable antonyms, if we replace one member of a converse pair with the other, we get sentences that cannot both be true but that can both be false:

What makes converse antonyms special, however, is that if we replace one word with the other and reverse the order of the arguments, we produce sentences which do not mean the same thing, but which are true in the same situation:

Reverse antonyms also refer to an asymmetric relation, but specifically, to processes that reverse each other’s outcomes. Examples are fill/empty, push/pull, break/fix, heat/cool. If we replace one member of such a pair with the other, we get sentences which, again, cannot both be true in the same situation but that can both be false:

Unlike with converse antonyms, we cannot reverse such sentences (*The bathtub filled Zoe). One interesting property of reverse antonyms is that they often allow an interesting use of again:

In such cases, again does not mean that the action named by the second verb is repeated (repetitive reading), but rather that the situation is restored to its original state (restitutive reading).

When two words stand in a generic-specific relationship, we call this relation hyponymy. We refer to the more specific word (e.g. dog or cat) as the hyponym and to the more generic word (e.g. mammal) as the superordinate or hyperonym. When you replace a hyponym with a hyperonym in a true sentence, the resulting sentence is also true:

However, if you replace a hyperonym with a hyponym in a true sentence, the resulting sentence may be true or false:

This exemplifies a special kind of hyponymy: taxonymy (not to be confused with taxonomy). Taxonymy is a relationship where it is natural to say that the referent of the hyponym is a kind of or type of the referent of the hyperonym, for example: A dog is a kind of mammal. There are also hyponymic relations that are not taxonymic. For example, stallion is a hyponym of horse, but it sounds odd to say (13):

A meronymy is a pair of words expressing a part-whole relationship. The word naming the part is called the meronym, the word naming the whole is called the holonym. For example, hand, brain and eye are all meronyms of body; door, roof and kitchen are all meronyms of house; etc.

It is important to remember that when we study patterns of meronymy, we are studying the structure of the lexicon, i.e., relations between words and not between the things named by the words. One linguistic test for identifying meronymy is the naturalness of sentences of the form The parts of an X include the Y, the Z, …, as in (14a-c):

In terms of the referents of the words arm, hand and finger, (14c) is true: the arm includes the hand, thus it also includes the parts of the hand. However, the words arm, hand and thumb — and words more generally — do not behave according to the real-world relations between their referents, but according to their sense, and sense relations do not always mirror reference relations.

CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. Adapted from Paul Kroeger, Analyzing Semantics, shortened and restructured by Anatol Stefanowitsch with minor edits by Berit Johannsen.