Using Web Data to Investigate Antonym Canonicity

In the literature, some researchers (e.g. Gross, Fischer and Miller 1989, Charles, Reed and Derryberry 1994) treat antonym pairs as either canonical (for example old/young, cold/hot and happy/sad) or non-canonical (aged/youthful, cool/hot, happy/miserable), while others assume or argue for a continuum between the two categories (e.g. Herrmann, Chaffin, Conti, Peters and Robbins 1979, Murphy 2003). Among the methods that have been used to investigate antonym canonicity are word association tests (Deese 1965, Clark 1970), judgement tests (Herrmann, Chaffin, Daniel and Wool 1986) and elicitation experiments (Paradis, Willners, Murphy and Jones, forth.). This paper approaches the issue by building specifically on research that has demonstrated the tendency of antonyms to favour certain lexico-grammatical constructions in discourse, such as both X and Y, from X to Y and whether X or Y (Justeson and Katz 1991, Mettinger 1994, Fellbaum 1995, Jones 2002). We argue that a language’s most canonical antonym pairs can reasonably be expected to co-occur with highest fidelity in such constructions (fidelity here refers to the tendency of words to co-occur with each other, in preference to other semantically plausible pairings, across the widest possible range of appropriate contexts) and that, given their relatively low frequency in language, an extremely large corpus is needed in order to identify such patterns. The specific aims of this paper are therefore (a) to assess the degree to which a series of lexico-grammatical constructions can be used as a diagnostic of antonymy; (b) to measure the strength of antonym pairs belonging to ten semantic scales by examining their co-occurrence fidelity within these constructions; and (c) to evaluate the usefulness of the World Wide Web as a corpus for research into certain types of low-frequency phenomena in language. In general, studies into antonym canonicity have been based on either the results of metalinguistic activities or on corpus-based searches. To begin with the former, it has been noted that “language users can intuitively sort ‘good’ (or prototypical) antonyms from not-so-good ones and downright bad ones” (Murphy 2003:11). This is often referred to as the “clang phenomenon” – a term used to describe the reaction to those pairs that intuitively strike the hearer as being good ‘opposites’ (Charles and Miller 1989,