Antonyms in Mind and Brain presents a multi-method empirical
investigation of opposition with a particular focus on the processing of
opposite pairs and their representation in the mental lexicon. Building
on recent cognitive accounts of antonymy which highlight the
fundamentally conceptual nature of antonymy, this book
- outlines previous literature to draw out criteria for good opposites
and establish the state of the art on the question whether the strong
connection of certain opposite pairs is primarily of a conceptual or
lexical nature.
- presents a detailed cross-linguistic empirical study combining corpus
data, speaker judgements and behavioural experiments for a wide range
of central (e.g. big: little) and peripheral (e.g. buy: sell;
wife: husband) opposite pairs to establish the contribution of
individual factors.
- proposes a model of the representation of opposite pairs in the mental
lexicon and illustrates how the processing consequences of such a
model account for the patterns observed in the data.
The approach taken in this book highlights the importance of using a
number of different methods to investigate complex phenomena such as
antonymy. Such an approach forms the empirical foundation for a dynamic
psycholinguistic model of opposition based on the conventionalisation
and entrenchment of the conceptual and lexical relationship of antonyms.
