Learning how to do it is part of the initiation ritual. Ken Hale's famous paper ' A Note on a Walbiri Tradition of Antonymy' describes an Australian culture where initiated males speak a form of secret language that uses only opposites, for every morpheme.

There are other uses of opposition and antonymy beyond English, however. What's the opposite of rabbit, for instance? Or cup? (William Labov did a series of experiments around 20 years ago that showed that cup and bowl had complex meanings that did not 'oppose' easily.)

But most adjectives don't occur in semantic clines, and then picking an 'opposite' is hard. A large portion of the questions received here at ELU.SE involve negation of one sort or another, because it is intrinsically confusing, and it's rarely covered in English classes of any sort.Īs explicated in the links, there are few real 'opposites' mostly these are words that occur on clines like freezing - cold - cool - warm - hot - boiling. Negation, on the other hand, is, like nouns and verbs, a feature of all languages, and its study is a very complex technical field in semantics, philosophy, and logic. They also have their own ideas of what constitutes an opposite. Hence neither have fixed meanings, since everybody has their own ideas about what words mean, and what words don't mean. Am I correct ? Should these changes in definitions be made in language ?Īntonym is a popular (i.e, non-technical) term that is often learned in school along with the term synonym, which is equally non-technical. The 'only' emphasises that there is no third option and hence no ambiguity and in this example, the antonyms make sense. So, shouldn't they be used only when they are not vague ? Like, existing and non-existing is a good example because if something is existing, then it definitely follows that it is not non-existing only. It has been made clear from the comments that antonyms can be ambiguous in many cases. What does opposite mean in english and how/why is it different from negation? Clearly, to not teach is a thing not uniquely defined and it can mean anything except to teach like to play, eat, etc. However, on internet, I saw that antonym of to teach is to learn. Does it mean a negation ? For example, negation of to teach is to not teach.

However, I cannot understand what does opposite in the definition mean.

What does antonym means