Good and bad opposites : using textual and experimental techniques to measure antonym canonicity

The goal of this paper is to combine corpus methodology with experimentalmethods to gain insights into the nature of antonymy as a lexico-semantic relationand the degree of antonymic canonicity of word pairs in language and inmemory. Two approaches to antonymy in language are contrasted, the lexicalcategorical model and the cognitive prototype model. The results of the investigationsupport the latter model and show that different pairings have differentlevels of lexico-semantic affinity. At this general level of categorization, empiricalmethods converge; however, since they measure slightly different aspect of lexico-semantic opposability and affinity, and since the techniques of investigationare different in nature, we obtain slightly conflicting results at the more specificlevels. We conclude that some antonym pairs can be diagnosed as “canonical”on the strength of three indicators: textual co-occurrence, individual judgementabout “goodness” of opposition, and elicitation evidence