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Opposition is a semantic relation in which one word has a sense or meaning that negates or, in terms of a scale, is distant from a related word. Some words lack a lexical opposite due to an accidental gap in the language's lexicon. For instance, while the word "devout" has no direct opposite, it is easy to conceptualize a scale of devoutness ...
When the antiphrasal use is very common, the word can become an auto-antonym, [3] having opposite meanings depending on context. For example, Spanish dichoso [ 4 ] originally meant "fortunate, blissful" as in tierra dichosa , "fortunate land", but it acquired the ironic and colloquial meaning of "infortunate, bothersome" as in ¡Dichosas moscas ...
Antithesis can be defined as "a figure of speech involving a seeming contradiction of ideas, words, clauses, or sentences within a balanced grammatical structure. Parallelism of expression serves to emphasize opposition of ideas". [3] An antithesis must always contain two ideas within one statement.
Tmesis – separating the parts of a compound word by a different word (or words) to create emphasis or other similar effects. Topos – a line or specific type of argument. Toulmin model – a method of diagramming arguments created by Stephen Toulmin that identifies such components as backing, claim, data, qualifier, rebuttal, and warrant.
Definitional retreat – changing the meaning of a word when an objection is raised. [23] Often paired with moving the goalposts (see below), as when an argument is challenged using a common definition of a term in the argument, and the arguer presents a different definition of the term and thereby demands different evidence to debunk the argument.
Binary opposition is the system of language and/or thought by which two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. [1] It is the contrast between two mutually exclusive terms, such as on and off, up and down, left and right. [ 2 ]
A contronym is a word with two opposite meanings. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together". This feature is also called enantiosemy, [1] [2] enantionymy (enantio-means "opposite"), antilogy or autoantonymy. An enantiosemic term is by definition polysemic.
Converses can be understood as a pair of words where one word implies a relationship between two objects, while the other implies the existence of the same relationship when the objects are reversed. [ 3 ] Converses are sometimes referred to as complementary antonyms because an "either/or" relationship is present between them.