Introducing English Linguistics

Table 6.3. Examples of gradable antonyms
Separate words
Prefixing with un-/in-/im-
young/old
intelligent/unintelligent
hot/cold
decent/indecent
beautiful/ugly
attractive/unattractive
tall/short
likable/unlikable
fat/thin
comfortable/uncomfortable
heavy/light
probable/improbable
high/low
forgettable/unforgettable
wide/narrow
civilized/uncivilized
happy/sad
happy/unhappy
But while many words that contrast are gradable adjectives, others are
not. For instance, dead and  alive are words that are clearly opposite in
meaning. However, they do not exist on a scale: something or someone is
either dead or alive, and there is no point on a scale between these two
extremes, as evidenced by the fact that it is impossible to describe a per-
son, for instance, as being very dead. It is possible to find intensification of
such adjectives, as when Fidel Castro was described in 2006 as being “very
alive and very alert” following surgery. But such expressions are more fig-
urative than literal. Because dead and  alive are binary opposites, Lyons
(1977) does not characterize the relationship between them as antonymy
but instead opposition. Others, however, take a more expansive view of

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antonymy. Jones (2002: 1), for instance, argues that because word pairs
such as dead and  alive are “intuitively recognized as ‘opposites’,” they
should be included within the class of antonyms proper. And, indeed,
empirical studies of antonymous word pairs provide many convincing
examples of antonyms having a range of different forms.
In their analysis of word pairs marked as antonyms in the Collins Cobuild
Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary (4th edn.), Paradis and Willners (2006)
found that while the majority of antonyms were adjectives (59%), other
form classes were represented as well: nouns (19%), verbs (13%), and other
(9%). In an empirical study of antonyms in a 280-million-word corpus of
articles from The Independent, Jones (2002: 31) chose to focus on 112
antonym pairs from four different word classes:
Adjectives: active/passive, bad/good, illegal/legal, long/short, feminine/
masculine, rural/urban, gay/straight
Nouns: advantage/disadvantage, boom/recession, guilt/innocence, optimism/
pessimism
Verbs: agree/disagree, confirm/deny, disprove/prove, fail/succeed, lose/win
Adverbs: directly/indirectly, explicitly/implicitly, officially/unofficially, quickly/slowly
Jones’ decision to include the nouns optimism/pessimism, for instance, is quite
justified because these nouns are very close in meaning to the gradable adjec-
tives  optimistic/pessimistic. It would thus be quite arbitrary to exclude 
optimism/pessimism from the class of antonyms simply because they are nouns.
But despite the fact that nouns, verbs, and adverbs can be antonyms,
antonymy is still, as Paradis and Willners’ (2006) frequencies demonstrate,
primarily a relation between adjectives. In addition, of the five most fre-
quent antonyms occurring in the corpus that Jones (2002: 33) examined,
which totaled 25 percent of the pairs he discovered, four were adjectives:
new/old, private/public, bad/good, hate/love, and poor/rich.