On the Distinctive Co-occurrence Characteristics of Antonymy

Abstract

Antonymy has long received particular attention in lexical semantics. Previous studies have shown that antonym pairs frequently co-occur in text, across genres and parts of speech, more often than would be expected by chance. However, whether this co-occurrence pattern is distinctive of antonymy remains unclear, due to a lack of comparison with other semantic relations. This work fills the gap by comparing antonymy with three other relations across parts of speech using robust co-occurrence metrics. We find that antonymy is distinctive in three respects: antonym pairs co-occur with high strength, in a preferred linear order, and within short spans. All results are available online.