Aspects of Semantic Opposition in English

Antonymy is recognized as an important type of meaning relation in natural language, yet there are very few detailed empirical studies of the topic. Through an analysis of a corpus of forty-three contemporary English-language novels, Mettinger isolates ten syntactic frames within which antonyms are regularly found: these serve as a useful heuristic tool for eliciting opposites from texts. Arguing that there are two kinds of antonyms—systematic and non-systematic opposites—he analyzes numerous pairs of antonyms, highlighting an important semantic relationship.