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Crutcher Dunnavant's Stuff
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Structural semantics holds that the entire structure of a language is a collection of oppositions - A is A in as much as it is not B, C, or any other letter of the alphabet, and similar relationships can be described for many aspects of language. This document seeks to concisely describe many of the different oppositions which make up language.
Structural semantics grew largely out of Ferdinand de Saussure's Linguistics[saussure:linguistics]. In its roughly 200 pages, the guidelines for phonology, phonemics, synchronic linguistics, and diachronic linguistics are laid out; and much of the work of linguistics for the next 50 years was either a) expanding upon these subjects, or b) challenging them.
This oppositional taxonomy seeks to provide a concise presentation of a fragment of synchronic linguistics in support of my research on Formal Language Design. As such, it is divorced from any discussion of phonetics or phonemics, as the languages I'm interested in all have formal symbols (usually text in a computer file).
Most of this document is constructed from Semantics[lyons:semantics1]. Unless quoting a large section, I will make very little effort to attribute specfific portions of this document to Semantics.
Okay, what is language? This question is the source of a good deal of debate, but for this document, I'm going to work with the following definition:
This definition is a bit hard to swallow, and raises a good deal of additional questions. The important ones are:
- What is a sign?
- What are the sign and content planes?
- Why are signs arbitrary?
- What is a discrete sign?
- How is a system of signs oppositionally structured?
- How is a system of signs paradigmatically structured?
- What is a lexical field?
- How can it be hierarchially structured?
- What is a conceptual field?
- How does a lexical field cover a conceptual field?
- How is a system of signs syntagmatically structured?
- What is a production rule?
Structural semantics holds that the entire structure of a language is a collection of oppositions - A is A in as much as it is not B, C, or any other letter of the alphabet, and similar relationships can be described for many aspects of language. The answers to most of the above questions bring to light different kinds of oppositions, which this document seeks to describe.
It is neccessary to establish a background vocabulary for those not familiar with linguistics. A valuable resource for this is The SIL International Glossary of linguistic terms. Below are a collection of excerpts derived partially from this work.
- has a semantic interpretation and
- embodies a distinct cultural concept.
morpheme - the smallest meaningful unit in the grammar of a language.
morphology - the study of the internal structure of words. As an example from antonymony, many antonyms are derived by attaching a morphological negation to a base-form (e.g honest : dishonest, fair : unfair). Consider also the wikipedia entry morpheme.
Antonymy is the term used to describe the relationship between opposite words, and there is a large body of evidence establishing the dominance of binary opposition in language usage, and by implication, linguistic function in the brain. However, there is a good deal more to binary opposition than might be obvious upon initial analysis. For example, the 3 antonym pairs: (True, False), (Good, Bad), and (High, Low), are in identifiably distinct forms of opposition, the first is a pair of ungradable opposites, the second a pair of gradable opposites without orientation, and the third a pair of gradable opposites with orientation. Other distinctions can also be identified, and this section will seek to describe the vocabulary of Antonymy.
Let's begin by discussing gradable and ungradable antonym pairs. Ungradable antonyms are opposite predicates with no intermediate values. One such pair is (True, False). For such ungradable antonym pairs, the assertion of one term and the negation of the other are equivalent and semantically substitutable. Returning to the example, True is equivalent to not(False), and False is equivalent to not(True). We may thus say that ungradable antonym pairs are contradictories in the logical sense, as they cannot both be true, and they cannot both be false; but these pairs also carry an oppositeness of meaning, which is not requierd of contradictories.
However, gradable antonyms are different, such pairs permit graduations of meaning, an example is the pair (bright, dark). For such gradable antonym pairs, the assertion of one term implies the negation of the other, but is not equivalent to it. While bright implies not(dark), and dark implies not(bright); not(bright) does not imply dark, nor does not(dark) imply bright. Thus, gradable antonym pairs are logical contraries, as they may not both be true; keeping the same restriction as above, for contradictories.
Gradable antonyms form the basis of direct and indirect comparison. In direct comparison, both objects of comparison are directly stated, such as in "Sue is smarter than Sally". Given such a direct comparison, an equivalent statement may be constructed by reversing the objects of comparison, and swapping the gradable antonym with it's opposite, as in "Sally is dumber than Sue". In indirect comparison, only one object is present, the other being implied by context, or by norm expectations. To say that "Sue is smarter", implies that their is a contextual object of comparison, while "Sue is smart" implies a comparison with our expected normal level of intelligence.
In many languages, including English, the most commonly used opposites tend to be morphologically unrelated (e.g. 'good':'bad', 'high':'low', 'beautiful':'ugly', 'big':'small', 'old':'young'). But these are outnumbered in the vocabulary by such morphologically related pairs as 'married':'unmarried', 'friendly':'unfriendly', 'formal':'informal', 'legitamte':'illegitimate', etc. In each case the base-form of one member of the pair is derived from the base-form of the other by the addition of the negative prefixes un- or in-. By virtue of this morphological correspondence, words like 'unfriendly', 'informal', etc., may be described as morphologically negative with respect to the corresponding morphologically positive words 'friendly', 'formal', etc.
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What is perhaps more important is that even morphologically unrelated opposites, like 'good' or 'bad', can be distinguished syntactically and semantically in terms of their positive or negative polarity. We tend to say that small things lack size, that what is required is less height, and so on, rather than that large things lack smallness and that what is required is more lowness. 'How good is it?' can be used without any presupposition or implication that the referent of 'it' is good rather than bad; but 'How bad is it?' carries with it the presupposition thath the referent of 'it' is bad rather than good (in relation to some relevant norm). The positive opposite tends to preced the negative when opposites are co-ordinated in what Malkiel (1959) calls irreversible binomials: cf. 'good and bad', 'high and low', 'great or small'. This principle of preferred sequence is in fact of much wider application. It enables us to distinguish a positive and a negative member in such contrasting pairs as: 'man' and 'woman', 'parent' and 'child', 'north' and 'south', 'heaven' and 'earth', 'food' and 'drink', 'buy' and 'sell', etc. As Malkiel points out, it seems to correlate quite well withh what, on other grounds too, we might describe as a hierarchy of semantic preference.
An additional form of opposition in language is orthogonal opposition. An oppositional pair is orthogonal to another when the pairs share a common center. The pairs which compose such a system are said to be antipodes, and the internal opposition of such pairs is said to be antipodal. As an example in English, the words north, south, east, and west compose such a system. north and south are antipodal to each other, as are east and west; additionally, north is orthogonal to east and west, east is orthogonal to north and south, and so on. Orthogonal sets of antonyms are import for capturing dimensionality in language.
Chap 8
- Structuralism
- The Saussurean dichotomies
- Relativism and functionalism
- Semantic Fields
- Syntagmatic lexical relations
- General evaluation of the theory of semantic fields
Chap 9
- Opposition and contrast
- Directional, orthogonal and antipodal opposition
- Non-binary contrasts
- Hyponymy
- Hierarchical structure in the vocabulary
- Lexical gaps
- Marked and unmarked terms
- Part-whole relations
- Componential analysis
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My Master's Thesis:
A Collection of Commodity XML Techniques for DSL Tool Development - A Pattern Language for Language Implementation
- XPath
- XSLT Syntax Summary
- XML Schema Regexs
- Unicode Regexs
- CSS Property Table
- Glossary of Lingusitic Terms