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disjoint opposites (or "incompatibles"), members of a set which are mutually exclusive but which leave a lexical gap unfilled, such as "red" and "blue", "one" and "ten", or "Monday" and "Friday". reversives, pairs of verbs which denote opposing processes, in which one is the reverse of the other. They are (or may be) performed by the same or ...
English irregular verbs are now a closed group, which means that newly formed verbs are always regular and do not adopt any of the irregular patterns. This list only contains verb forms which are listed in the major dictionaries as being standard usage in modern English. There are also many thousands of archaic, non-standard and dialect variants.
Only certain verbs or nouns can be used to form a new verb having the opposite meaning. In particular, using verbs describing an irreversible action produces words often considered nonsense, e.g. unkill, unspend, unlose, unring. These words may nevertheless be in occasional use for humorous or other effect.
An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not. [1] Such words usually have a prefix or suffix that would imply that there is an antonym, with the prefix or suffix being absent or opposite.
Indeed, Norwegian shows the opposite trend: like in English, active verbs are sometimes used with a passive or middle sense, such as in boka solgte 1000 eksemplarer ' the book sold 1000 copies '. -s is the normal passive ending in the Scandinavian languages. andas ' breathe ' (cf. Danish ånde and Norwegian Bokmål ånde (non-deponent))
An advanced English syntax based on the principles and requirements of the Grammatical society. London: Keegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & co. A new edition of An advanced English syntax, prepared from the author's materials by B. D. H. Miller, was published as Modern English syntax in 1971. Palmer, F. R. (1974). The English verb. London: Longman.
Own and belong are relational opposites i.e. "A owns B" is the same as "B belongs to A." Win and lose i.e. if someone wins, someone must lose. Fraction and whole i.e. if there is a fraction, there must be a whole. Above and below; Employer and employee; Parent and child; Teacher and student; Buy and sell; East and west; Predator and prey
In linguistics, this is called conversion; when a noun becomes a verb, it is a denominal verb, when a verb becomes a noun, it is a deverbal noun. In English, many nouns have become verbs. For example, the noun "book" is now often used as a verb, as in the example "Let's book the flight".