What a corpus-based dictionary tells us about antonymy

Summary, in English

This paper investigates the treatment of antonymy in Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s

English Dictionary (2003) in order to find out what kinds of headwords are provided with antonyms

as part of their definitions and also discusses the principles for antonym inclusion in the entries.

CCALED includes canonical antonyms such as good/bad and dead/alive, as well as more

contextually restricted pairings such as hot/mild and flat/fizzy. The vast majority of the antonymic

pairings in the dictionary are adjectives. Most of the antonyms are morphologically different from

the headwords they define and typically do not involve antonymic affixes such as non-, un- or -less.

Only just over one-third of the total number of pairs are given in both directions. The principles for

when antonyms are included in CCALED are not transparent to us.

• Author: Carita Paradis; Caroline Willners
• Editor: E. Corino; C. Maraello; C. Onesti
• Department/s: English Studies; General Linguistics
• Publishing year: 2006
• Language: English
• Pages: 213-220
• Publication/Series: Proceedings XII EURALEX International Congress
• Full text: - 88 kB; Download statistics
• Links: http://www.euralex2006.unito.it/PROGRAMMApom_07_09.html
• Document type: Conference paper
• Topic: Languages and Literature; General Language Studies and Linguistics
• Keywords: corpus-based methods; antonymy; lexicology
• Conference name: EURALEX
• Conference date: 0001-01-02
• Status: Published