IN SUPPORT OF ANCILLARY ANTONYMY: EVIDENCE FROM ARABIC

Back to Page Authors: Hamada S. A. Hassanein

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Keywords: al-ṭibāq/antonymy, al-muqābala/opposition, ancillary antonymy/opposition, paradigms, Classical Arabic

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Abstract: Ancillary antonymy is a highly frequent and dominant category that has been retrieved and validated by a number of subsequent studies across languages, including English, Swedish, Japanese, Dutch, Serbian, Arabic and Chinese. Two subsequent studies, however, removed this ancillary function from the developed typologies on the ground that it is an epiphenomenal function featuring within transcategorical frames. This study seeks to provide evidence for the preponderance of ancillary antonymy in discourse as a distinct category by developing a provisional structural typology of it based on an Arabic discourse dataset. New paradigms are proposed to show how the ancillary function of antonymy is pragmatised on a cline from canonicity to noncanonicity on the syntagmatic axis. The proposed paradigms include interchanging opposition of canonical, less canonical and noncanonical antonyms, synonyms, meronyms, analogues and duplicates. The developed typology might serve as a toolkit for the analysis of ancillary opposites across other languages.

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