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Contexts of antonymous adjectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Walter G. Charles
Affiliation:
Oregon State University, Corvalis
George A. Miller*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
*
George A. Miller, Green Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544

Abstract

The method of sorting is used to compare sets of adjectival contexts. Contexts of directly antonymous adjectives are found to be highly discriminable, both with sentential and phrasal contexts. These results are used to argue that words with different meanings normally appear in discriminably different contexts, and that the cue for learning to associate direct antonyms is not their substitutability, but rather their relatively frequent co-occurrence in the same sentence.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

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