Antonyms

The term antonymy is sometimes employed to mean any kind of oppositeness. I follow the practice of most semanticists in applying it to one particular sort of opposition, exemplified by noisy and silent in (2.8).

(The scoring through of 2.8d is deliberate and will be explained below.)

Antonymy is defined by a pattern of entailments such as the one in (2.8c): if we know that (2.8a) is true, then we can be sure that, with regard to the same (part of) the same street at the same time, (2.8b) is false, or equivalently that the negation of (2.8b) is true (2.8a ⇒ NOT2.8b). And if we know that (2.8b) is true, it follows – again provided that we keep the place and time constant – that the street was not noisy (NOT2.8a).

Both of the entailments shown in (2.8c) go from an affirmative sentence to a negative one. With antonym pairs, we do not get the entailments in (2.8d). They are have been scored through to indicate that they do not hold. The reason that they do not hold is because there is middle ground between what noisy denotes and what silent denotes, as I try to suggest in Figure 2.2.

Imagine a complaint to the mayor that a particular street is noisy. The mayor denies this and the complainant then says “Well, it’s not silent”. The mayor can reasonably respond by saying “Agreed, but it is not noisy either”. There is a middling range of sound levels that are not loud enough to count as noisy, but that also cannot be said to be silent/noiseless.

Some other antonym pairs are listed in (2.9).

The list in (2.9) is longer than the ones given in (2.4) and (2.6). All three lists could easily be extended, but a list of antonym pairs can easily be made longer than lists of either synonyms or complementaries. The explanation for there not being all that many synonyms is that they are something of a luxury. Courteous offers the same entailments, no more and no fewer, that we get from using the word polite. Thus we could do without one of them if the transmission of information was our only concern.

Synonyms are perhaps tolerated because they allow us to speak and write expressively: varying the way we convey the same information and manipulating assonances, rhymes, alliterations and rhythms. Similar considerations make it something of a luxury to have both members of a complementary pair. Whatever information we can convey with, for instance, the word false can be can be put across by saying not true, or vice versa. However, there are considerations of perspective that make either a negative or an affirmative more appropriate in some circumstances, so we might not all that willingly give up one member of each complementary pair.