Antonymy and Canonicity: Experimental and Distributional Evidence

The present paper investigates the phenomenon of antonym canonicity by providing new behavioural and distributional evidence on Italian adjectives. Previous studies have showed that some pairs of antonyms are perceived to be better examples of opposition than others, and are so considered representative of the whole category (e.g., Deese, 1964; Murphy, 2003; Paradis et al., 2009). Our goal is to further investigate why such canonical pairs (Murphy, 2003) exist and how they come to be associated. In the literature, two different approaches have dealt with this issue. The lexical-categorical approach (Charles and Miller, 1989; Justeson and Katz, 1991) finds the cause of canonicity in the high co-occurrence frequency of the two adjectives. The cognitive-prototype approach (Paradis et al., 2009; Jones et al., 2012) instead claims that two adjectives form a canonical pair because they are aligned along a simple and salient dimension. Our empirical evidence, while supporting the latter view, shows that the paradigmatic distributional properties of adjectives can also contribute to explain the phenomenon of canonicity, providing a corpus-based correlate of the cognitive notion of salience.