Abstract
This paper uses Esperanto—a constructed language with transparent morphology but rich semantic-pragmatic components—to study antonymy and polarity. We investigate the distribution of the Esperanto antonymy morpheme ‘mal-’ (as in, for instance, ‘mal-alta’: antonym-tall, short) in a 4.3 million-word corpus, Tekstaro, and use it as an empirical basis to assess different theories of negative antonyms. Our methodology consists in investigating the extent to which the antonymy morpheme ‘mal-’, which we take to denote negative polarity, bears the linguistic features predicted by traditional linguistic tests (such as incompatibility with measure and ratio phrases and low likelihood of nominalisation).
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics (IATL 26) |
| Publisher | Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University |
| Pages | 1-8 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Publication status | Published - 2010 |
| Externally published | Yes |