Antonymy and gradability: A corpus-based approach on English gradable antonyms

This study examines the nature of antonymy relations of six gradable pairs (old/young high/low, thick/thin, wide/narrow, big/small and tall/short) in terms of their frequencies and collocation in COCA (the Corpus of the Contemporary American English created by Mark Davies). The frequencies of the chosen twelve adjectives are counted and then the mean frequencies of the unmarked members and the marked members are calculated. The results reveal that the unmarked members of the pairs are used more frequently than their marked counterparts, which backs up the prediction that the unmarked adjectives are employed more frequently than their marked counterparts in general. The analysis of the collocation of the adjectives shows that the chosen pairs differ in terms of the extent to which they share common collocates. Four pairs (old/young, high/low, thick/thin and wide/narrow) have common collocates, which implicates that the antonyms can play in the same semantic fields. On the other hand, two pairs (big/small and tall/short) do not share any collocates. Hence in terms of the common collocates, some pairs are claimed to better qualify as antonyms than the others. The reason the latter pairs do not have common collocates is claimed to be the presence of other salient antonyms of one member. (Ajou University)