Antonyms in English Construals, Constructions and Canonicity Studies in English Language Series

The study of antonyms (or 'opposites') in a language can provide important insight into word meaning and discourse structures. This book provides an extensive investigation of antonyms in English and offers an innovative model of how we mentally organize concepts and how we perceive contrasts between them. The authors use corpus and experimental methods to build a theoretical picture of the antonym relation, its status in the mind and its construal in context. Evidence is drawn from natural antonym use in speech and writing, first-language antonym acquisition, and controlled elicitation and judgements of antonym pairs by native speakers. The book also proposes ways in which a greater knowledge of how antonyms work can be applied to the fields of language technology and lexicography.

1. Antonymy and antonyms; 2. Antonyms in context; 3. Antonyms and canonicity; 4. Antonyms in acquisition; 5. Antonyms and negation; 6. Antonyms as constructions; 7. The cognitive construal account; 8. Conclusions - looking backward, looking forward.

Steven Jones is Senior Lecturer in English Language in the School of Education at the University of Manchester.
M. Lynne Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of English at the University of Sussex.
Carita Paradis is Full Professor in the Centre for Languages and Literature at Lund University, Sweden.
Caroline Willners is a researcher in Linguistics in the Centre for Languages and Literature at Lund University, Sweden.