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Opposite relationships in terminology

Article  in  Terminology · April 2016

DOI: 10.1075/term.22.1.02gag

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 Opposite relationships in terminology

Anne-Marie Gagné and Marie-Claude L’Homme

Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte
Département de linguistique et de traduction
Université de Montréal
anne-marie.gagne@umontreal.ca; mc.lhomme@umontreal.ca

Abstract. This article studies a family of semantic relationships that is often ignored in
terminological descriptions, i.e. opposite relationships that include but are not limited to
antonymy. We analyze English and French terms classified in an environmental database
as opposites (Eng. polluting; green, afforestation; deforestation; Fr. réchauffer; refroidir,
atténuation; intensification) and revise this first classification based on typologies and
criteria supplied by literature on lexical semantics, psycholinguistics and corpus
linguistics. Our revised classification shows that diversified opposite relationships can be
observed between terms. They also appear to display the same complexity as in general
language. Finally, in some cases, the nature of concepts in the specific subject field must
be taken into consideration.

Keywords: antonymy, opposite, term, semantic relationship, terminological database,

environment

1. Introduction

Representing relationships between concepts or between terms has always been an

essential part of terminological analysis in nearly all its applications since this helps
unveil the conceptual structure of specific subject fields or the semantic structure of its
terminology. While the focus has traditionally been placed on relationships such as
generic-specific (or hypernymy and hyponymy), whole-part (or meronymy and
holonymy), and exact synonymy (for terms denoting the same concept), an increasing
number of relationships are currently being considered, such as cause-effect, entity-
function, located in, etc. (León and al. 2009; Marshman and al. 2008; Sager 1990).
Efforts are made to discover them in corpora and/or represent them in resources.

1
 Paradoxically, a relationship defined as central by linguists and psycholinguists,
namely antonymy or in more general terms opposition (Cruse 1986; Fellbaum 1995;
Lyons 1995; Murphy 2003, among others), is often ignored in terminology work. A few
exceptions are Amsili (2003) who proposed a theoretical characterization of opposition;
and Kocourek (1991) and L’Homme (2004) who offer brief definitions of different forms
of opposition. We will assume, along with these latter authors, that opposition can be
observed between terms and that the relationship should be taken into account in
terminological resources.

This paper is an attempt to better understand opposite relationships in terminology

and to classify different kinds of opposites. We analyze English and French terms that
were previously encoded as opposites in a terminological database. However, the
preliminary encoding had been done intuitively and many inconsistencies appeared in the
data. In this work, we analyze the data in a more systematic manner based on existing
typologies and propose a classification of the different categories of opposites that we
found.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 is a brief overview of how opposites

can or have been considered in terminology. Section 3 presents the objectives of our
analysis and some theoretical assumptions on which it is based. Then, in Section 4, we
describe our methodology and data set. Section 5 shows how pairs of opposites in our
data set were classified. Section 6 presents our results and discusses some problems
raised by the classification. We conclude in Section 7 and mention some directions for
future work.

2. Opposites in terminology and specialized subject fields

Consider the following sentences extracted from corpora of environmental texts (climate
change, electric vehicles, renewable energy, and deforestation):

2
 (1) Sustainable development thus involves protecting and improving the quality of the
environment.
Development with modern knowledge offers many opportunities to avoid past
unsustainable practices …

(2) Deforestation can also reduce rainfall in certain areas, increasing the threat of
desertification.
Afforestation is usually defined as the establishment of forest on land that has been
without forest for a period of time (e.g., 20 - 50 years or more) and was previously
under a different land use.

(3) Nearly every automaker is announcing vehicles that can plug in and run on electricity.
Hybrid and PHEVs are able to blend electric and engine power to propel the vehicle
and therefore require less total onboard power than the E-REV.

(4) In the polar regions however, regional warming has been considerably greater.
For another, global warming is still in its early stages.

If we assume that the lexical items in bold correspond to terms in the field of the
environment, then these examples show that some terms can be perceived as opposites of
others. However, they also show that opposite relationships are diverse and cannot be
characterized with the same set of criteria. For instance, unsustainable versus sustainable
can be roughly characterized as “not sustainable” or “something that is not sustainable is
necessarily unsustainable”. This first characterization cannot be applied to the
deforestation; afforestation or run; propel pairs (they do not share a conceptual domain in
two mutually exclusive parts). These latter terms can still be said to appear in an opposite
relationship, but a different one.
As was said above, very few terminologists have described opposition as such in
specialized resources. We see two reasons for this state of affairs. It can be partly
explained by the fact that the focus has been placed on nouns, and very often nouns that
denote entities, whereas prototypical antonymy occurs between adjectives1 and slightly
less prototypical forms of opposition appear between verbs. In terminology, pairs that
could have been defined as opposites have been more naturally examined from the
perspective of co-hyponyms. Amsili (2003) suggests that, in terminology, antonymy is a
specific case of co-hyponymy. For example, in terminological analysis, the multiword
expressions private vehicle and public vehicle (in the field of transportation) would be
considered as terms rather than the adjectives private and public as such. “Private
1
In WordNet, for instance, antonymy relationships are given for adjectives.

3
vehicle” and “public vehicle” would be defined as specific concepts of “vehicle”. In
ontologies, they would further be characterized as disjunct categories (i.e. no item can
belong to both categories simultaneously).
This kind of analysis raises two problems from the point of view of the data we
analyzed:

 Although all co-hyponyms are incompatible,2 they cannot all be defined as

opposites. For instance, vehicle has many other hyponyms (car, truck, bus, train)
that are not perceived as opposites;
 Opposite relationships can be observed between lexical items that are not defined
as co-hyponyms. Co-hyponymy necessarily involves a third item, i.e. a hypernym
that includes both hyponyms. Considering the examples (1) to (4), lexical
hypernyms cannot be suggested for all pairs: the opposite relationship considered
is binary (sustainable; unsustainable, global; regional).

We conclude from the observations made in this section that the description of the
relationships between the terms in examples (1) to (4) should be approached from the
point of view of lexical semantics (where abundant literature has been published on the
subject). However, it must be kept in mind that, when envisaged from the point of view
of special subject fields, lexical units can display specific semantic properties, as will be
seen below, and this has an impact on the relationships they share with other lexical units.

3. Objectives and theoretical assumptions

Our main goal in this work is to characterize opposition in terminology and to define
relevant categories of opposites. More specifically, we seek to develop a method for
organizing in a systematic way the English and French opposites pairs of a terminological
resource on the environment called DiCoEnviro (2015, Dictionnaire fondamental de
l’environnement). The entries of the resource are encoded based on lexico-semantic
frameworks (chiefly Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology, ECL (Mel’čuk et al. 1995)).

2
In fact, for this statement to be true, the co-hyponyms considered must be differentiated from the
hyperonym with the same characteristic or feature. But these are the co-hyponyms considered in
terminological representations.

4
 The categories of opposites to be defined should be both flexible and inclusive
enough to be useful for users of our database; they should also be well delineated in order
to be meaningful (i.e. capture the differences between the types of opposites as those
illustrated in examples (1) to (4)). Our work draws on a number of typologies and
theoretical work by lexicographers, lexical semanticists, corpus linguists and
psycholinguists (Atkins and Rundell 2008; Cruse 1986, 2001, 2011; Fellbaum 1995;
Jones 2002; Murphy 2003; Polguère 2003) and on some of the proposals made by Amsili
(2003) on the import of those concepts in terminology. This work is used first to
characterize opposition (Section 3.1); then to establish a first typology of forms of
opposition that are likely to occur in our data (Section 3.2).

3.1 Opposition and antonymy: a first approach

First, opposite relationships that are considered in this work occur between “lexical units”
(LUs), defined as lexical items with a specific meaning. (Cruse 1986; Mel’čuk et al.
1995) For instance, clean has at least two different meanings (and thus corresponds to
two different lexical units): clean1 “free from dirt” and clean2 “that does not have a
negative impact on the environment.” This means that LUs with identical forms can share
an opposite relationship with different LUs. Clean1 is opposed to dirty, whereas clean2 is
opposed to polluting.
However, a single lexical unit may have more than one opposite, but in the case of
antonymy, which denotes exclusive relationships, the forms of opposition will necessarily
differ (unless an LU shares a relationship with exact synonyms in which case these
relationships will be the same).
For instance, polluting shares an opposite relationship with non-polluting,
polluted, and green, but the relationships have different explanations:
- Something that is not polluting is necessarily non-polluting; ? something that is
green is necessarily non-polluting;
- A green thing or activity is designed as something that should not be polluting; it
can also correspond to a thing or activity designed to reduce pollution;
- Something is polluted by the thing or activity that is polluting; something is
polluting when it pollutes something (this becomes a polluted thing or activity)

5
 From the point of view of lexical semantics, opposition occurs in a domain
defined intrinsically or as “the normal presupposition of use of the words themselves.”
(Cruse 1986, 199) However from the perspective of terminology, it occurs within a
previously defined specialized domain or subdomain. In other words, we think of
opposite relationships as occurring between meanings considered from the perspective of
a specialized subject field.
The perspective taken here relates to phenomena labelled by Cruse (2011) as
subsenses or more specifically micro-senses. A given situation can give a different
perspective on meaning. (Cruse uses the example of knife that is linked to fork and spoon
when considered from the point of view of cutlery, but linked to gun and cosh when
envisaged from the point of view of weapons.) In terminology, a specific reading is given
by the subject field from which terms are considered. In climate change, for example,
warm characterizes the climate or temperature and is opposed to cold or cool; warming to
cooling, etc. Similarly human can be opposed to nature in the field of the environment; in
other fields, human could be opposed to animal. This phenomenon should not be
confused with polysemy per se (see the clean example above).
Thus we define opposition as a bidirectional relationship of incompatibility
between two LUs or terms within a specialized domain. In other words, opposite
relationships occur between terms which display semantic features that cannot be
simultaneously present. (Cruse 2011, 165-166) This binary and symmetrical relation of
exclusion can be summarized with the logical proposition: if it is X, it is not Y, and if it is
not X, it is Y as shown in examples (5) to (7):
(5) If it is a case of absorption, it is not a case of emission, and vice versa.
(6) If it grows, it does not decline, and vice versa.
(7) If it is harmful, it is not harmless and vice versa.

However, as explained in Section 2, incompatibility alone is not sufficient to fully

explain opposite and antonymy relationships. In a narrow sense, in what will be treated
here as antonymy, the perceived oppositeness arises – paradoxically – from a semantic
similarity, inside which a sole strong semantic dimension distinguishes or sets apart two
LUs. The semantic similarity that characterizes opposite relationships implies that pairs

6
are usually defined between terms that belong to the same part of speech3 and the same
semantic class as shown in examples (8) to (11):
(8) compatible; incompatible (both adjectives and properties)
(9) driver; passenger (both nouns and entities)
(10) decline; growth (both nouns and activities)
(11) pollute; depollute (both verbs and activities)

An interesting lexical pointer in the identification of opposite pairs is a

morphological relation resulting from affixation, as explained by Muehleisen:
In addition to un- and in-, English also has the prefixes dis- (like/dislike,
honest/dishonest) and de- (colonize/decolonize, emphasize/deemphasize), as
well as the suffixes -less and -ful, which together sometimes form pairs of
antonyms (harmless/harmful). (Muehleisen 1997, 2)

Other general pointers in the identification of opposite pairs (particularly pairs of

antonyms) are their co-occurrence and similar typical use. While co-occurrence with
“higher than chance frequencies” between potential opposites (12) should be considered
as an indicator, the members of a pair are not expected to be fully substitutable (13), as it
has been shown that each displays its own selectional restrictions. (Fellbaum 1995)
Similar distribution patterns4 or typical use (14) should, however, be considered as a
basic requirement for opposition.
(12) a. the warming and cooling effects produced by direct and indirect radiative
b. with warming up to about 6 km, and cooling at higher altitudes within the
stratosphere
c. a warming until the early 1940s, then a moderate cooling until the mid-1970s
(13) a.CO2 a common global warming gas
b. * CO2 common global cooling gas
(14) a. the cooling of: atmosphere, climate, planet, region, stratosphere, temperature.
b. the warming of: atmosphere, climate, earth, ocean, region, stratosphere,
temperature, water.

3
Fellbaum, however, considers that groups of morphologically related adjectives, nouns and verbs,
sometimes express the same concept; according to the author, this demonstrates that the encoding of
opposite attributes into precise parts of speech might simply be arbitrary. (Fellbaum 1995, 285) Murphy,
for her part, explains that the representation of opposite concepts cross-linguistically by different
subtypes of antonyms (subtypes that are associated with particular parts of speech), is the reflection of
existing differences in the meaning represented in each particular language and not the result of arbitrary
lexical features. (Murphy 2003, 192) Along these last lines, we think that morphologically related pairs of
antonyms pertaining to different parts of speech also reflect differences in meaning inside a language.
4
‘’Distribution pattern’’ refers broadly to the set of contexts in which an LU typically occurs, and more
specifically, in the case of an adjective, to the nouns it modifies and in the case of a verb, to the typical
subjects and to the objects with which it generally occurs. (Muehleisen 1997)

7
3.2 Forms of opposition
In order to account for the different forms of opposition that are likely to occur in our
data (cf. examples (1) to (4)), a first typology was set up based on those that appear in the
literature. According to this typology, opposite pairs fall into four categories that are
briefly presented below: complementaries, gradables, reversives and converses.5
The first two categories6 – complementaries and gradables – are the most
commonly accepted and are often limited to adjectives denoting properties which are
symmetrically opposed on the basis of a sole strong semantic dimension.
Complementaries are defined as pairs which entirely bisect a domain (as in Figure 1):
therefore there are no existing situations where neither of them is true, nor are there
middle values between them.7 They are contradictory in that the denial of one member
automatically entails the assertion of the other. (Cruse 1986)

Alive Dead

Figure 1. A pair of complementaries bisecting the domain of organisms

Gradables antonyms are pairs of opposites between which lies a range of existing values
and that can be modified by comparatives and superlatives. They are usually represented
as positioned on a graduated scale at the same distance from the center or “pivotal
region”, as illustrated in Figure 2. (Cruse 1986, 205; Lehrer and Lehrer 1982, 487).

5
Examples presented in the rest of this section are those given in the literature, which explains why they
are related to the general lexicon.
6
These two categories (with or without variants) are also referred to as basic types (Cruse 1986). Along
the same line, complementaries have been referred to as complementary antonyms (Murphy 2003) and
non-gradable antonyms (Jones 2002) while gradables are also called simply antonyms (Cruse 1986),
gradable contraries, classical antonyms (Murphy 2003), antonymes scalaires (Amsili 2003 and Polguère
2003) and polar antonyms (Atkins 2008).
7
We should be careful not to confuse the non-existence of a middle ground with a lexical gap. As
exemplified by Amsili, the fact that no existing LU designate the space between far and near, does not
imply that something cannot be neither far nor near. (Amsili 2003)

8
 Pivotal region

Short Long

Figure 2. A gradable pair situated on the scale of length

In some particular cases, the semantic dimension which sets apart two LUs is related to a
directional opposition (or its representation or metaphorical extension). Reversives are
generally defined as pairs of verbs (that designate activities) denoting either a change of
direction between two absolute states or an opposite movement between two relative
states as shown in Figure 3. A reversive relationship does not imply that the manner these
activities unfold is exactly the same. (Cruse 1986)

Lenghthen
Shorter Longer
er

Shorten
Figure 3. A pair of reversives, which members denote a change of direction between two relative states

In the case of converses8, the sense of opposition arises from a special case of semantic
symmetry resulting from the permutation of arguments. Figure 4 illustrates the relation of
converseness between precede and follow.

Figure 4. Semantic symmetry between precede and follow

8
Also referred to as reciprocal (Jones 2002) and characterized as relational opposites. (Cruse 1986)

9
While the directionality of some converse pairs might actually be difficult to perceive,
they represent two different perspectives on the same relationship, as shown in Figure 4.
(Cruse 1986) Based on this example we can formulate two logically equivalent sentences,
which mirror each other, as in Figure 5. The perceived equivalence arises from a change
of position between the arguments of the members of this converse pair: mouse, the first
argument of precede, becomes the second argument of follow. Cat also changes status: it
is the second argument of precede, but the first argument of follow.9

The mouse precedes the cat

The cat follows the mouse

Figure 5. An argument permutation between a pair of converses

This first classification of forms of opposition does not exhaust all possibilities
and many asymmetrical, complex, impure or weaker opposite relationships have been
discussed in the literature. These cases or similar ones are also likely to occur in our data.

4. Methodology
The starting point of this analysis is the set of opposite pairs that were encoded under a
family labeled Opposites (Contraires in French) in a terminological database called
DiCoEnviro. This set comprises 437 pairs of LUs identified as sharing an opposite
relationship by the terminologists who worked on this resource over the course of the last
eight years. (L’Homme 2015) 177 pairs were formed by English LUs and 260 by French
LUs. Our data included not only nouns (145 pairs), but also verbs (154 pairs), adjectives
and adjectival phrases (133 pairs) and adverbs (5 pairs).10

9
Converseness can be defined as a kind of synonymy since the inversion of arguments produces two
sentences that have the same meaning. Here, we consider the relationship between the LUs themselves.
However, it should be pointed out that converseness does not always entail antonymy (Polguère 2003).
10
It should be noted that among these pairs, some represent the same relationship encoded in the
opposite direction (polluting is encoded as an opposite of green in the entry for green; green was encoded

10
 In order to test the typology presented in Section 3.2 and further categorize the
pairs under analysis, a set of lexical and semantic properties was examined: part of
speech, semantic class, organization of actants (i.e. arguments) in the actantial structure
(i.e. argument structure); number, position and role of actants. This data about terms and
opposite pairs was established in order to assist in the application of tests for
distinguishing types of opposites. We also hypothesized that some links could be made
between these properties and forms of opposition.
Part of this information was directly extracted from the terminological database
(Figure 6):
 The term (Terme): the headword of a specific entry.
 The opposite term (Lien).
 Their respective parts of speech (Tpd; Lpd).
 Their actantial structure (Tsa; Lsa).
 Their current classification (AFonction).

Figure 6. A few lines of the English xml sheet showing the information extracted from DiCoEnviro.

The organization of actants established itself as an obvious criterion, as it could

give us precise information on the semantic similarity or difference of a given pair of
LUs. Moreover, it would allow us to easily identify cases of converseness, by detecting

as an opposite of polluting in the entry for polluting). However, the bidirectionality is not systematic, since
the database in under construction.

11
pairs of LUs with two similar structures distinguished only by a change of position
between two actants. In DiCoEnviro, the actantial structure is presented as shown in
Figure 7.

absorption: ~ of Patient{ gas | radiation } by Destination{ ecosystem }

Figure 7. The actantial structure of absorption in DiCoEnviro

Figure 7 shows that absorption has two actants, whose roles are Patient in the first
position and Destination in the second position. Typical linguistic realizations of those
roles can be found between the brackets following the name of the role. Shared actant
realizations between two LUs are related to similar typical uses and should be used as an
indicator of opposition between these precise meanings, whereas the absence of shared
realizations might indicate that these LUs are not true opposites.
Regarding the actantial structure, there are cases in which actants are presented as
split actants, i.e. two roles are specified for a single actant. We considered these to be
equivalent to structures where only one of the roles is stated (e.g. Agent or Cause ~
Patient is considered equivalent to Cause ~ Patient).11
In addition to the information extracted from the database (Figure 6), we created
several new fields to add information resulting from our analysis:
 Semantic class (CatSem).
 The final classification (NF…).
 Notes on actantial structure (Actants).
 Notes on the realizations of actants (Combinatoire).
 General comments (Notes), for example results in tests, as shown in
Figure 8.

11
Whether it is an entity (in our example an Agent) or an activity (here a Cause) initiating an action is
more a matter of labelling than a factor that has a real impact on opposite relationships. Furthermore, as
the DiCoEnviro is an ongoing project, the fact that we have only found cases where the first actant is an
activity until now, does not imply in any way that we will not find cases where it is an entity in the future.

12
 Figure 8. A few lines of the English xml sheet showing all the fields12

In order to verify if forms of opposition are associated with a particular semantic class,
we indicated these classes in our analysis. The set of classes we used is based on Sager
and Kageura (1994). The authors established four general concept classes: “entity”,
“activity”, “property” and “relation” for classifying concepts in terminology from a
pragmatic point of view. The first three were useful for our purposes13:
 “entities” are concepts obtained from the abstraction of items from our
experience;
 “activities” are obtained from the abstraction of processes, operations or events
carried out by or with these entities;
 “properties” are constituent characteristics of entities, activities and relations and
their abstraction. (Sager and Kageura 1994)
We then proceeded to classify the 260 pairs of French opposites. To assist us during the
analysis, a dynamic web page was created, allowing us to obtain a better general
perspective on the work accomplished and on problematic cases. We then repeated the
same steps with the 177 English pairs. Each author was responsible for analyzing the data
in a different language. During the final stages, the results were compared in order to
discuss difficult and atypical cases. As we worked, we refined and modified the typology
(presented in Section 5) and took a few methodological decisions that are discussed in the
following paragraph.

12
Mêmes nombre d’actants: Same number of actants; Mêmes roles: Same roles
13
The fourth one being “relations”. As the DiCoEnviro is compiled following a lexico-semantic approach,
terms that would have been considered useful to refer to relationships between concepts in a conceptual
approach (terms such as position, level, proximity, etc.), were probably considered as belonging to the
general lexicon and not included as specialized terms.

13
 If a questionable or atypical pair included a term for which no entry had been
created, we simply eliminated the pair since we did not have enough data to correctly
interpret its meanings or define its linguistic properties. Other pairs were also eliminated
because they corresponded to encoding errors: some opposites were matched having in
mind a different lexical unit (often related to the general lexicon) and did not actually
concern the field of the environment. For example, harmful and beneficial has been first
perceived as opposites. However, beneficial could not be found in the entries of the
database, since it had not been defined as a term. As explained above, we consider that
opposite relationships occur between LUs and not between lexical items. As a result, we
ended up processing a total of 362 pairs (225 pairs in French and 137 in English).

5. Opposition as observed in our data

The classification of the English and French data from DiCoEnviro led us to adopt four
general classes of opposites relevant for terminological work: antonyms (Anti),
reversives (Rev), converses (Conv) and contrastives (Contr).14 The latter class was added
to the typology examined in Section 3.2 for reasons that will be explained below. Of
these four classes, antonyms were further divided into complementaries (Anti1) and
gradables (Anti2) subclasses, while we also distinguished two subclasses of reversives
(Rev1 and Rev2). Finally, we also found some pairs that could be validated only partially
with the criteria defined for these first classes and subclasses. We will discuss these at the
end of this section.
Complementary antonyms, were relatively frequent (36 pairs, 19 in French, 17 in
English), as we had the option of defining very restricted conceptual fields related to our
previously defined specialized domain and subdomains. For instance, light and heavy are
complementaries in the limited field of motorized vehicles. As stated by Amsili (2003),
this class of opposites is more frequent where specialists impose a certain worldview

14
The labels used for encoding opposite relationships are an adaptation of those used in Explanatory
Combinatorial Lexicology (ECL) for lexical functions (Mel’čuk et al. 1995). A lexical function (LF) is designed
to represent the syntactic and semantic properties of paradigmatic as well as syntagmatic relationships. In
many cases, LFs indicate (in the form of subscript numbers) the actants that are involved in the
relationship. For instance, a Conv relationship between precede and follow would be encoded as Conv21
showing that actants 1 and 2 of the first LU are inverted to obtain the second LU. In what follows we will
refer to the generic Conv without indicating the actants.

14
through terminology and explicit principles to support it. In this case, heavy is defined by
law in Quebec as equivalent to a GVW (gross vehicle weight rating) over 4,500 kg, while
light means a rating under 4,500 kg (SAAQ 2014). Therefore these two LUs divide
exhaustively this precise field. Three tests were adopted for evaluating complementaries:
a. The negation of one member of the pair necessarily entails the assertion of the
other, while the assertion of this same member also necessarily entails the
negation of the other: if it is not X, then it is necessarily Y; and if it is X, then it is
not Y.
(15) This organism is not aerobic, then it is necessarily anaerobic, that organism is
aerobic, then it necessarily is not anaerobic.

b. Either one member or the other is valid; there are no situations where both
terms are invalid, nor is there middle ground between them: it is either X or Y.
(16) Organisms are either aerobic or anaerobic
(17) *This organism is neither aerobic, nor anaerobic

c. Complementaries cannot be modified by adverbs and cannot be used with

comparatives and superlatives.
(18) ? This organism is very aerobic
(19) ? This organism is more anaerobic than that one.

Complementaries, as expected, were mostly adjectives designating properties, like

sustainable and unsustainable and both members of a pair share the same actantial
structure (same roles and typical terms that belong to the same semantic class):
(20) sustainable: ~ Patient{ development }
(21) unsustainable: ~ Patient{ exploitation }

French complementaries also included pairs between different parts of speech which
nevertheless fulfilled the same syntactic function. They were mostly relationships
between adjectival phrases and adjectives, as shown in examples (22) and (23).
(22) Cette énergie est renouvelable ou non renouvelable. (Eng. This energy is renewable
or non-renewable)
(23) Une technologie filaire ou sans fil. (Eng. A wired or wireless technology)

15
 Gradable antonyms, while a central category of opposites in the general lexicon,
were not so common in our data (11 pairs, 5 in French, 6 in English). Selection tests for
gradables were defined as follows:
a. Both members of a pair cannot be valid at the same time: it is X, then it is not
Y; it is Y, then it is not X:
(24) If the air is dry, it is not humid and if the air is humid, it is not dry.
(25) *The air is dry and humid

b. Even if situation a is characterized by a member, it can be characterized by

“more or less” with the other member with respect to another situation; situation a
is X, but it is more Y than situation b.
(26) The air is humid, but it is dryer than yesterday’s.

c. The more a member is modified with an LU expressing intensity, the more it

sets both members apart: the more a situation is X, the less it is Y.
(27) When the air is extremely dry, it is less humid than when it is dry.

d. In some situations, neither member is valid: it is neither X nor Y

(28) The air is comfortable; it is neither dry nor humid.

The gradables found in our data were exclusively adjectives denoting properties
that share identical actantial structures; however, we provide for the possibility to include
nouns displaying the same characteristics (we might encounter at least some that are
morphologically related to gradable adjectives, such as dryness and humidity, which also
denote properties).
Reversives form a large part of our data (77 pairs, 48 in French, 29 in English) as
physical or metaphorical directionality seems to constitute the semantic component that
sets apart most verbal opposites. However the variation displayed by other characteristics
of these pairs, particularly regarding actantial structure, led us to consider two rather
distinct subclasses of reversives.
Reversives 1 consist in a change of direction (or its metaphorical extension)
applied to an entity between two absolute states (entities are generally labelled in our
actantial structures as Patient or Item). Therefore, the initial state of the first member
corresponds to the final state of the second member and vice versa, so both members

16
represent a different perspective on a situation. As a result, the actantial structures of both
members sometimes differ in that one role changes, in most cases from a Destination to a
Source (or vice versa). Examples (29) and (30) present the actantial structures of the pair
afforestation; deforestation. We consider the initial and final states “with trees” and
“without trees” as absolute because they mean something by themselves.
(29) afforestation: ~ of Destination{ area.1 } by Agent{ human } to place Item{ tree }
(30) deforestation: ~ of Source{ region } by Agent{ human } to remove Item{ tree }

Reversives 2 concern the relationship of two opposite movements between

relative states, meaning that these states only make sense when referring to each other.
Two LUs sharing a reversive 2 type relationship have identical actantial structures, as in
examples (31) and (32). In this case, the initial and final states cooler and warmer are
relative to each other (something might get cooler and still be perceived as warm).
(31) cool: Agent{ aerosol } or Cause{ change.1a.1 } ~ Patient{ climate.1}
(32) warm: Agent{ gas } or Cause{ change } ~ Patient{ climate.1 }

In the case of both reversives, our data not only includes verbs designating
activities such as pollute and depollute, but their nominal counterparts also designating
activities, such as pollution and depollution.
In the case of converses (21 pairs, 11 in French, 10 in English), there is only one
simple selection criterion based on differences between the actantial structures of
members of a pair. Members of a converse pair have absolutely identical actantial
structures except for the change of position of one or more of their actants (33, 34):
a. Considering LUs X and Y which both have an actantial structure with two
actants if actant 1 of X is role a and actant 2 is role b, then actant 1 of Y should
be role b, while actant 2 is role a.
(33) run: Patient{ vehicle.1 } ~ on Means{ electricity.1 } or Instrument
{ battery.1 }
(34) propel: Means{ electricity.1 | fuel.1 } or Instrument{ motor.1 } ~ Patient
{ vehicle.1 }

Contrastives (77 pairs, 55 in French, 22 in English) constituted a very large

proportion of our data. While based on the category defined by Polguère (2003),
contrastives in our data set include: 1. pairs that are vaguely perceived as opposites, and
which are dissimilar in more than one semantic dimension (35) – excluding cases related

17
to asymmetrical relationships or relationships involving near synonyms of one member
presented in the next paragraph –; and 2. pairs that encapsulate more than a single
opposition, resulting in a weaker sense of opposition (36). Compared to the other
categories, contrastives cannot be related so much to “raw physical facts”, as they mostly
correspond to social or specialized constructs.
(35) Recover and dispose are perceived as loosely opposed, but differ in more than a
dimension. Their basic semantic opposition maybe is “throw” and “keep”, but
they also do not involve the same agents and recover lead to a result, while
dispose does not.
(36) Urban and rural are also perceived as vaguely opposed and could be seen as
encapsulating the following oppositions: densely populated; scarcely populated,
covered with buildings; not covered with buildings, loud; quiet, polluted; less
polluted, industrial; agricultural, etc.

In addition to the pairs that were classified in the four general classes and four subclasses
presented above, we found cases that could be validated only partly with the criteria that
we used. In many of these cases, we had identified a canonical antonym for a given term
(e.g., polluting; non-polluting), but another term could still be perceived as an opposite
(e.g., polluting; green). These were defined as atypical opposite relationships. In these
cases, we used the label used for the other pairs (Anti, Contr, etc.) but added Q in front of
it (QAnti, QContr, etc.).15 We present such cases below.
The first case is used to take into account asymmetrical gradables (green and
polluting in Figure 9).

Pivotal region

Non-polluting Green Polluting

gng

Figure 9. A pair of asymmetrical gradables

15
Q is also used in ECL (Mel’čuk et al. 1995, see note 11) and stands for quasi. It is used with standard
lexical functions such as Syn (QSyn, stands for near-synonymy).

18
“Asymmetrical” characterizes the relation of one member of a gradable pair (in Figure 9,
polluting, from the pair polluting; non-polluting) with another value on the opposite side
of the scale (green in Figure 9). Atypical gradables were encoded with QAnti2.
The second type of atypical opposite relationship corresponds to the relation
between the first member of a pair of gradables, reversives 1 or 2, converses (38) or
contrastives (37) with a near synonym of the second member.
(37) recycle; discard (the true contrastive for discard is recover)
(38) harmful; endangered (harmful being the near synonym of threatening)
(39) global; regional (regional being a near synonym of local; local is the true
contrastive of global)

The third atypical case of opposition that we wish to discuss in this section is related to
cases where a relation of reversiveness could be identified, but the number of actants of
members of a pair differed. For instance, emit was defined as an LU with three actants (a
Source emits a Patient into a Destination) whereas absorb has two actants (a
Destination absorbs a Patient). These were labeled as QRev.

6. Results and discussion

Table 1 summarizes the classification described in Section 5 and presents some of the
linguistic aspects observed within each category.

Table 1. Summary of forms of opposition between terms and linguistic properties

Category No. of pairs Parts of Semantic Org. of AS Morph.

in the data speech class related?

Complementaries En: 17 Adjectives Properties Same number of In some cases,

Fr: 19 Adjectival actants; same yes; other
phrases semantic roles cases, no.
Prefixes an-,
in-, un- and
suffix –less
were found
(dé- and in- in
French)
Gradables En: 6 Adjectives Properties Same number of No cases were
Fr: 5 actants, same observed.
semantic roles
Near antonyms En: 6 Adjectives Properties No systematic No
Fr: 6 regularity
Reversives 1 En: 12 Verbs Activities Same number of In some cases,
Fr: 19 Nouns actants yes; in others,

19
 Sometimes change no, Prefixes
in one semantic role de-, dis-, were
(usually Source vs. found (dé- in
Destination) French)
Reversives 2 En: 17 Verbs Activities Same number of In some cases,
Fr: 29 Nouns actants; same yes; in others,
semantic roles no. Prefix de-,
was frequently
encountered
(dé- in French)
Near reversives En: 28 Verbs Activities No systematic No
Fr: 53 Nouns regularity
Conversives En: 10 Verbs Activities Same number of No
Fr: 11 Nouns Entities actants; permutation
of actants
Near conversives En: 3 Adjectives Properties Same number of No
Fr: 0 actants; permutation
of actants
Contrastives En: 22 Adjectives Activities No systematic No
Fr: 55 Adjectival Entities regularity
phrases Properties
Adverbs
Nouns
Verbs
Near contrastives En: 11 Adjectives Activities No systematic No
Fr: 26 Adverbs Entities regularity
Nouns Properties
Verbs
Unclassified En: 5 - - - -
Fr: 2

When analyzing the data, some opposite pairs raised specific challenges. This section will
further discuss some of these cases.
Some challenges were related to the way the data was described in our database.
For instance, the driver;passenger can be intuitively perceived as conversives, based on
the respective roles of each animate with respect to the vehicle. However, their actantial
structures as defined did not allow us to apply our criteria for conversiveness. We
classified them as such anyway and will probably revise their actantial structures in the
future.
We also met some pairs in which an LU combines with a larger spectrum of
actantial realizations than its potential opposites. A good example would be atténuer
(Eng. mitigate), which means “to reduce severity, intensity and strength.” Consequently,
it had been defined as an opposite of aggraver, intensifier and renforcer (Engl. intensify).
However, each opposite covers only a specific range covered by atténuer. According to
our classification, could they be seen as three distinct pairs of reversives? The obvious

20
problems here is that reversiveness is an exclusive relationship and reversives are
supposed to differ only with respect to directionality; however, atténuer differs in another
aspect since it has a wider application range. As these three pairs, showed all the other
characteristics of reversives, they were considered as QRev2.

7. Concluding remarks
This work allowed us to better characterize opposition between pairs of terms that had
previously been defined as such rather intuitively. It also showed that opposite
relationships in a single field of knowledge, namely the environment, are diversified and
fall into different categories. Furthermore, while some opposites fall into prototypical
categories (such as complementaries and gradables); others are much more difficult to
capture with existing criteria.
As in general language, our analysis also revealed that the same term can share
different forms of opposition with two or more lexical units: polluting; non-polluting,
polluting; green, eliminate; recover; eliminate; recycle. One pair could probably be
perceived as more typical than others; nevertheless, others can still be interpreted as
opposites based on the criteria we applied.
Reversives were the most frequently encountered, representing almost a fourth of
our data, while contrastives were also abundant. More ‘’traditional’’ categories
considered in lexical semantics, were not as frequent as we could expect, particularly
gradables represented a little more than 2% of our data. Finally, the creation of labels for
atypical relationships allowed us to encode a total of 133 pairs which, while not
corresponding to classical types of opposite, are still a valuable source of information for
our users.
We also emphasized the fact that we took into account the perspective given by
specialized fields when interpreting the data. We believe this is an important factor that
cannot be overlooked when analyzing opposite relationships (or any kind of lexical
relationships for that matter) in terminology. As discussed above, some opposites, such as
lourd and léger, which would be considered as gradables in the general lexicon, share a
different antonymy relationship when considered from the point of view of
transportation.

21
 While this was not a proper objective when we set ourselves to observe the data,
our analysis allowed us to spot some inconsistencies in other aspects of the description
(actantial structure, pairs wrongly encoded as antonyms, etc.).
What remains to be done now is to reflect on how these distinctions should be
presented to users of terminological resources. Should we maintain them all (for instance,
even if terminologists encoding the data differentiate complementaries from gradables
(Anti1 and Anti2), should the distinction be made explicit for users)? Probably not.
However, we must define the level of granularity that would be useful from the point of
view of users.
In future work, we plan to apply this methodology and the classification that
results from it to another set of data, perhaps opposites found in another specialized
subject field (for example, computer science, a field that is much more technical in nature
than the environment). While we can assume that most categories will be found in other
fields of knowledge, their distribution might differ. Another interesting area would be to
explore how experts in specialized fields of knowledge perceive opposite relationships
with tests designed to analyze these perceptions. Finally, we believe that opposition
relationships could be taught in courses on specialized languages, specialized translation
and/or terminology and could serve as a basis (along with other relationships) to
understand knowledge in given subject fields.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council
(SSHRC) of Canada. We would like to thank Benoît Robichaud for his help in extracting
relevant sets of data from the terminological database as well as François Lareau and two
anonymous reviewers for their comments on a previous version of this article.

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