Reviews

Antonyms in English: Construals, Constructions and Canonicity by Caroline Willners, Steven Jones, Carita Paradis, M. Lynne Murphy

jefflilly's review

5.0

Excellent book. It surveys the current state of research quickly and thoroughly, and makes it clear that antonym research is both very difficult and very important. There are several different ways to approach the research, and it’s rather like trying to explore the ocean with radar: some things come through clearly, others are hazy, and most of it remains mysterious. The book lands on an analysis I basically agree with, but the proposal (the idea of an Antonym Construction that is only lexical, with no syntactic or surface ordering information) is bold, and I think has a lot of theoretical implications. I think construction grammars already have a problem of “overgenerating” possible linguistic expressions (i.e., they are good at describing observed languages, but would also be good at describing languages that are not observed) and lexical-only constructions would only make that problem worse.