Introducing English Linguistics

telligent [stupid]
and can reflect on their own experience, make connec-
tions, and cooperate to achieve agreed objectives.
(CIC)
In contrast, the short excerpt below was taken from a casual conversa-
tion in which the speaker wishes to directly convey that the person
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being discussed is indeed not very smart. Using unintelligent would
reduce the emphasis that the speaker wishes to achieve.
He’s just so stupid [unintelligent].
(CIC)
Part of the force of stupid is that it has become, as the OED notes, “a term of
disparagement or abuse.” Thus, this more recent meaning of stupid may cloud
other meanings just as describing someone as being gay is more likely to lead
to the interpretation that the individual is homosexual rather than happy.
Other differences are more subtle, as in the case of buy and  purchase.
There are certainly cases where the two words can be interchanged:
The family bought [purchased] a house in Park Street, London, and
another converted Tudor farmhouse near Esher.
(ICE-GB W2F-017 082)
Sangster recently purchased [bought] a 10-acre property in the South of
France, apparently to concentrate on his golf.
(BNC A4B 342)
However, forms of the two verbs occur in very different contexts. In the
BNC,  bought and  purchased have very different distributions across regis-
ters. In spontaneous conversations, bought occurs at a frequency of 348
occurrences per million words; purchased, in contrast, did not occur at all.
Of all the registers in the BNC, commerce had more instances of purchased
(67 occurrences per million words) than any other register. The reason for
this distribution is that unlike bought,  purchased is associated with some
kind of formal commercial transaction. Thus, bought sounds somewhat
awkward in the first example below, since what is being offered for sale is
a commercial product in a formal business context:
The serving machines are available in a selection of sizes and can be
leased or purchased [?bought].
(BNC A0C 1147)
In the examples below, purchase[d] sounds awkward because the transac-
tions are quite inconsequential, and the contexts highly informal:
I had a long layover in Memphis and I went and bought [?purchased]
this magazine just cuz it sounded like it was going to be fun and it was 
(MICASE LES565SU137)
Can I buy [?purchase] you a cognac?
(BNC CEC 829)
Because word pairs such as difficult/hard, unintelligent/stupid, and  buy/
purchase cannot always be substituted for one another, they are regarded
as near synonyms, which many linguists argue are more common in nat-
ural language than absolute synonyms.
Antonymy.
While synonyms have similar meanings, antonyms have
opposite meanings. For Lyons (1977: 279) and Murphy (2003: 170), antonymy
is a type of contrast; for Cruse (2004: 162), it is a type of oppositeness. But
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while these and other theorists acknowledge some kind of difference
between word pairs that are antonyms, exactly which pairs are actually
considered antonyms is subject to some disagreement.
More narrowly focused definitions of antonymy restrict the class of
antonyms to adjectives that are gradable. According to this view, adjec-
tives such as old and  new would be antonyms because they depict two
extremes on the scale of age:
old
new
There are various linguistic devices that can be used to mark points
between these two extremes. First, both these adjectives have comparative
and superlative forms: older/oldest and newer/newest. Thus, one can say that
X is newer or older than Y, or that X is the oldest and Y is the newest.
Second, both adjectives can be preceded by degree adverbs, such as very and
somewhat, indicating differing points on the scale of oldness and newness:
very old old somewhat old
somewhat new new
very new
With old and new, two distinct words are antonyms. But in English, it is
also possible to create an antonym simply by adding a negative prefix,
such as un-, to an adjective. Table 6.3 contains examples of both types of
gradable antonyms.
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