Invented Antonyms: Esperanto as a Semantic Lab∗
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper uses Esperanto—a constructed language with transparent morphology but rich semantic-pragmatic components—to study antonymy and polarity. We investigate the distribution of the Esperanto antonymy morpheme ‘mal-’ (as in, for instance, ‘mal-alta’: antonym-tall, short) in a 4.3 million-word corpus, Tekstaro, and use it as an empirical basis to assess different theories of negative antonyms. Our methodology consists in investigating the extent to which the antonymy morpheme ‘mal-’, which we take to denote negative polarity, bears the linguistic features predicted by traditional linguistic tests (such as incompatibility with measure and ratio phrases and low likelihood of nominalisation).
منابع مشابه
Role of Antonymy Relations in Semantic Judgments
Decision times for sentences or word pairs involving direct (e.g., boy-girl) or indirect (e.g., boy-sister) antonyms were measured in a sentence verification task and a lexical decision task. In Experiment 1 false sentences involving the direct antonyms were disconfirmed faster than sentences involving the indirect antonyms, even though the former were rated as more closely related in meaning. ...
متن کاملTo heal the mind's eye of hate--Dr. Ludwik Zamenhof.
Ludwik Zamenhof (1859-1917), born in Poland, invented and propagated Esperanto - an artificial, easy-to-learn language. Literally meaning "language of hope," Esperanto was constructed to avoid misunderstandings, establish communication and facilitate harmony among different nationalities. Simply, he wanted people to accept one another despite observed differences. He was a skilled ophthalmologi...
متن کاملA Multitask Objective to Inject Lexical Contrast into Distributional Semantics
Distributional semantic models have trouble distinguishing strongly contrasting words (such as antonyms) from highly compatible ones (such as synonyms), because both kinds tend to occur in similar contexts in corpora. We introduce the multitask Lexical Contrast Model (mLCM), an extension of the effective Skip-gram method that optimizes semantic vectors on the joint tasks of predicting corpus co...
متن کاملLecture 5 : Semantic Orientation Lexical Semantics and Discourse Processing
1 Semantic Orientation of Adjectives Antonymy Linguistic tests for complementaries and antonymy type Linguistic vs. natural polarity Antonymy Linguistic tests for complementaries and antonymy type Linguistic vs. natural polarity Oppositeness and Antonymy There are different kinds of opposites: complementaries and antonyms Semantic orientation: degree of positiveness/negativeness. Many antonyms ...
متن کاملIs Black Always the Opposite of White? An Investigation on the Comprehension of Antonyms in People with Schizophrenia and in Healthy Participants
The present investigation sought to expand our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying the recognition of antonyms and to evaluate whether these processes differed in patients with schizophrenia and in healthy controls. Antonymy is the most robust of the lexico-semantic relations and is relevant to both the mental organization of the lexicon and the organization of coherent discours...
متن کامل