Antonyms as lexical constructions : or , why paradigmatic construction is not an oxymoron 1

This paper argues that antonymy is a syntagmatic as well as a paradigmatic relation, and that antonym pairs constitute a particular type of construction. This position relies on three observations about antonymy in discourse: (1) antonyms tend to co-occur in sentences, (2) they tend to co-occur in particular contrastive constructions, and (3) unlike other paradigmatic relations, antonymy is lexical as well as semantic in nature. CxG offers a means to treat both the contrastive constructions and conventionalised antonym pairings as linguistic constructions, thus providing an account of how semantically paradigmatic relations come to be syntagmatically realised as well. After reviewing the relevant characteristics of CxG, it looks at some of the phrasal contexts in which antonyms tend to co-occur and argues that at least some of these constitute constructions with contrastive import. It then sketches a new type of discontinuous lexical construction that treats antonym pairs as lexical items, and raises issues for further discussion. 0. Introduction Antonymy (lexical opposition) has traditionally been classified as a paradigmatic relation between words. That is, antonym pairs form a contrastive paradigm within a semantic field, such that in contexts in which one member of the pair can occur, so could (with different truth conditions) the other member of the pair. In this way, it is likened to other lexical-semantic paradigms, such as synonymy and hyponymy. This is illustrated in (1), in which any member of any of the paradigms could grammatically and logically occur. 1 I am grateful to Steve Jones, Anu Koskela, Carita Paradis, Caroline Willners and anonymous referees for comments on earlier versions of this paper. This is a revised and expanded version of a paper given at the Third International Conference on Construction Grammar, Marseille, July 2004, for which I acknowledge funding from the University of Sussex Humanities Research Fund. 2 Note that I use “antonym” in the broad sense of the term, referring to any contrasting lexical pair, regardless of the type of logical relation it is in. This is in contrast to the more narrow sense ‘gradable contrary’ used by some authors, e.g., Lyons (1977) and Cruse (1986).