SYNONYM and ANTONYM

Idris PBI
Synonymy is the relationship between two predicates that have the same sense.
Example : In most dialects of English, stubborn and obstinate are synonym.
In many dialects, brigand and bandit are synonyms.
In many dialects, mercury and quicksilver are synonyms.

Example of perfect synonymy are hard to find, perhaps because there is little point in a dialect having two predicates with exactly the same sense. Note that our definition of synonymy requires identify of sense. This is a stricter definition than is sometimes given : sometimes synonymy is defined as similarity of meaning, a definition which is vaguer than ours. The price we pay for our rather strict definition is that very view examples of synonymy, so defined, can be found.
Clearly the notions of synonymy and sense are interdependent. You can’t understand one without understanding the other. These concepts are best communicated by a range of example. In general, when dealing with sense relations, we shall stick to clear cases. (We admit the existence of many genuinely unclear, borderline cases). In considering the sense of the word, we abstract away from any stylistic, social, or dialectal association the word may have. We concentrate on what has been called the cognitive or conceptual meaning of the word.
Example : How many kids have you got ?
How many children have you got ?
Here we would say that kids and children have the same sense, although clearly they differ in style, or formality.
Synonym is a relation between predicates, and not between words (i.e. word forms). Recall that a word may have many different senses, each distinct sense of a word (of the kind we are dealing with) is a predicate. When necessary, we distinguish between predicates by giving them subscript number. For example, hide¹ could be the intransitive verb, as in let’s hide from Mummy, hide² could be transitive verb, as in Hide your sweeties under the pillow, hide³ could be the noun, as in We watched the bird from a hide, and hide4 could be the noun, as in The hide of an ox weighs 200 lbs. The first three senses here (the first three predicates) are clearly related to each other in meaning, whereas the fourth is related. It is because of the ambiguity of most words that we had formulate practice questions about synonym in terms of sentences. The sentence The thief tried to hide the evidence, for example, make is clear that one is dealing with the predicate hide² (the transitive verb). Hide² is a synonym of conceal.

The definition of synonymi as relationship between the sense of words requires a clear separation of all the different senses of a words, even though some of these sense may be quite closely related, as with hide¹, hide², and hide³.
All of the examples so far have been of synonymy between predicates realized grammatically by a word of the same part of speech, for example between adjective and adjective, as with deep and profound. But the notion of synonymy can be extended to hold between words of different part of speech, for example between the verb sleeping and the adjective asleep. Example like these are not the kind usually given of synonymy, but they help to make the point that the sense of a word does not depend entirely on it’s part of speech. Grammar and meaning are separate though closely of language.
ANTONYMY

A traditional view of antonymy is that it is simply ‘oppositeness’ of meaning’. This view is not adequate, as word may be opposite in meaning in different ways, and some words have no real opposites.
Hot is not the opposite of cold in the same way as borrow is the opposite of lend. Thick is not the opposite of thin in the same way as dead is the opposite of alive.

Basic types of antonymy :
a. Binary antonymy
Binary antonyms are predicates which come in pairs and between them exhaust all the relevant possibilities. If the one predicate is applicable, than the other cannot be, and vice versa.
Example : true and false
If a sentence is true, it cannot be false. If it is false, it cannot be true.
Sometimes two different binary antonym can combine in a set of predicates to produce a four-way contrast.
Example : The word man, woman, girl can be placed appropriately in the following chart.

male female
Adult man woman
Non-adult boy girl

We see that combination of binary antonyms produce more complicated (e.g. four-way) system of contrast, but then within such systems the most natural way to pairs of antonyms is along the same dimension, e.g. man vs. woman (along the male/female dimension), but not man vs. girl (cutting across both dimension).



b. Converses
If a predicates describes a relationship between two things (or people) and some other predicate describes the relationship when the two things (or people) are mentioned in the opposite order, then the two predicates are converses of each other.

Example : parent and child are converses, because X is the parent of Y (one order) describes the same situation (relationship) as Y is the child of X (opposite order).

The notation of converseness can be applied to example in which three things (or people) are mentioned. The case of buy and sell in one such example.
In both types of antonymy discussed so far, binary antonymy and converseness, the antonym come in pairs. Between them, the members of a pair of binary antonym fully fill the area in which they can be applied. Such areas can be thought of as miniature semantic system. Thus, for example, male and female between them constitute the English sex system, true and false are the member of the truth system etc. Other such system can have three, or four, or any number of members.
What these system have in common is that (a) all the terms is a given system cover all the relevant area. For instance, a playing card cannot belong to both the hearts suit and the spade suit. And beside hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades, there are no other suits. System such as there are called system of multiple incapability.


c. Gradable Antonyms
Two predicates are gradable antonyms if they are at opposite ends of a continuous scale of values (a scale which typically varies according to the context of use).
Example : Hot and Cold are gradable antonyms.
Between hot and cold is a continuous scale of values, which may be given names such as warm, cool, or tepid. What is called hot in one context (e.g. of even temperatures in a recipe book) could well be classed as cold in another context (e.g. the temperatures of stars.)

A good test for grad ability, (i.e. having a value on some continuous scale, as gradable antonyms do, is to see whether a word can combine with very, or very much, or how? Or how much? For example, How tall is he? Is acceptable, but How top is that self ? Is not generally acceptable.

d. Contradictories
A proposition is a contradictory of another proposition if it is impossible for them both to be true at the same time and of the same circumstances. The definition can be naturally be extended to sentences, thus a sentences expressing one proposition is a contradictory of a sentence expressing another proposition if it is impossible for both propositions to be true at the same time and of the same circumstances. Alternatively (and equivalently) a sentence contradicts another sentence if it entails the negation of the other sentence.
Example : this beetle is alive is contradictory of This beetle is dead.