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Complementary antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite but whose meanings do not lie on a continuous spectrum (push, pull). Relational antonyms are word pairs where opposite makes sense only in the context of the relationship between the two meanings (teacher, pupil). These more restricted meanings may not apply in all scholarly ...
In linguistics, converses or relational antonyms are pairs of words that refer to a relationship from opposite points of view, such as parent/child or borrow/lend. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] The relationship between such words is called a converse relation . [ 2 ]
Some pairs of contronyms are true homographs, i.e., distinct words with different etymologies which happen to have the same form. [7] For instance cleave "separate" is from Old English clēofan, while cleave "adhere" is from Old English clifian, which was pronounced differently.
If the opposites were completely balanced, the result would be stasis, but often one of the pairs of opposites is larger, stronger or more powerful than the other, such that over time, one of the opposed conditions prevails over the other. When this happens, it undermines unity, because unity depends on a robust duality of opposites.
Oxymorons in the narrow sense are a rhetorical device used deliberately by the speaker and intended to be understood as such by the listener. In a more extended sense, the term "oxymoron" has also been applied to inadvertent or incidental contradictions, as in the case of "dead metaphors" ("barely clothed" or "terribly good").
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.
[6] A core concept of hyponymy is "type of", whereas "instance of" is differentiable. For example, for the noun city , a hyponym (naming a type of city) is capital city or capital , whereas Paris and London are instances of a city, not types of city.
The expression "macaroni and cheese" is an irreversible binomial.The order of the two keywords of this familiar expression cannot be reversed idiomatically.. In linguistics and stylistics, an irreversible binomial, [1] frozen binomial, binomial freeze, binomial expression, binomial pair, or nonreversible word pair [2] is a pair of words used together in fixed order as an idiomatic expression ...