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<!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal">In support of Volker Gast’s thoughts, I would like to approach the problem from a mathematical /
computer science point of view, which allows for a clear generalization.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Words, like numbers, are sequence of elements, i.e. think of
the word ‘human’ as similar to the number, let me say, 124. In mathematics, a way to make 124 the
opposite is through adding minus before it, thus -124. The same strategy exists
in linguistics and it is called negation, in our case ‘non-human’. Alternative ways to change the meaning of a sequence of elements in mathematics and in
linguistics are: 1) modifying the sequence, e.g. 224 instead of 124 and ’numan' instead of ‘human'; and 2) combining that sequence with other elements, i.e. putting a form into context in linguistics. However,
in mathematics / computer science, in isolation, a sequence of elements always
has a single meaning because if it has not, no computation is possible. I think that the same logic applies to
linguistics, i.e. it is impossible to have a form (lexeme) in isolation associated
with two opposite meanings.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Best,</p><p class="MsoNormal">Stela</p><div class="">
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class="">---</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class="">Dr. Stela MANOVA</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class="">Middle European Interdisciplinary Master Program in Cognitive Science</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class="">Department of Philosophy </div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class="">University of Vienna</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class="">Universitätsstraße 7</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class="">A-1010 Vienna</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class="">Austria</div></div><div style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Email: <a href="mailto:stela.manova@univie.ac.at" class="">stela.manova@univie.ac.at</a> <br class="">URL: <a href="http://homepage.univie.ac.at/stela.manova/" class="">http://homepage.univie.ac.at/stela.manova/</a> <br class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
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<div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On 31.05.2018, at 15:32, Volker Gast <<a href="mailto:volker.gast@uni-jena.de" class="">volker.gast@uni-jena.de</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div class=""><br class="">The question is, does Sahidic Coptic 'ehrai' mean 'up' and 'down' or simply 'changing its position on a vertical axis'?<br class=""><br class="">Same for lexemes meaning both 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' -- they could simply mean 'not today'. German has an adverb 'einst', which means either 'in the past' or 'in the future' -- it's an adverbial of (remote) non-present time.<br class=""><br class="">There are languages that use the same word for 'son-in-law' and 'mother-in-law'. But then, these words simply mean 'non-[blood-related] relative'.<br class=""><br class="">'Host' and 'guest' (also etymologically related in English, as far as I know) can be subsumed under 'role in a context of hospitality'. Such cases are very common, I think. We Germans tend to confuse Engl. 'borrow' and 'lend', as we don't differentiate between these meanings. Germ. 'leihen' bassically means 'being involved in a temporary exchange of goods, with an obligation to return the exchanged goods'. The sentential context tells you who lends and who borrows.<br class=""><br class="">There are probably languages that do not distinguish between dogs and foxes. A dog cannot be a fox, but a canid/canine can be either. That's a simple matter of hierarchical organization (heteronymy/hyperonymy).<br class=""><br class="">With respect to 'personne' etc., polarity items interact with the sentential environment. I don't think that they 'mean' anything out of context.<br class=""><br class="">I think the question is whether there are words denoting complementary sets. I don't see how this could work, as you would end up with an inherently contradictory predicate, as David pointed out. For instance, an adjective denoting both 'colorful' and 'colorless' -- and nothing else -- could not truthfully be predicated of any object (except perhaps in lexicalized cases of irony, but then, we'd have to assume that a new lexeme has been created).<br class=""><br class="">And I agree that it is hard to think of an internally negated version of 'go'. Such a verb would denote events that imply the absence of going. 'Stay' is probably a candidate, but verbs are not normally organized in terms of complementarity.<br class=""><br class="">To conclude, I think the question is not an empirical one. A word which indicates both membership to a category C and non-membership to that category cannot truthfully be predicated of any individual or object, and a word that cannot be used truthfully would likely drop out of use pretty soon; and it would probably not even emerge in the first place.<br class=""><br class="">But it might be useful to provide more precise definitions to begin with, specifically of the syntagm 'bipolar polysemy'.<br class=""><br class="">Volker<br class=""><br class="">_____________<br class="">Prof. V. Gast<br class=""><a href="http://www.uni-jena.de/~mu65qev" class="">http://www.uni-jena.de/~mu65qev</a><br class=""><br class="">On Thu, 31 May 2018, Eitan Grossman wrote:<br class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">In the Sahidic dialect of Coptic (Afroasiatic), ehrai means 'up' and 'down.'<br class="">Eitan GrossmanLecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences<br class="">Hebrew University of Jerusalem<br class="">Tel: +972 2 588 3809<br class="">Fax: +972 2 588 1224<br class="">On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 2:15 PM, Mathias Jenny <mathias.jenny@uzh.ch> wrote:<br class=""> In Thai, cʰâj means 'be so', but in literary style it is also used to mean 'not be so'.<br class="">Mathias Jenny<br class="">mathias.jenny@uzh.ch<br class="">On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 1:07 PM Giorgio Francesco Arcodia <giorgio.arcodia@unimib.it> wrote:<br class="">I don't know if that counts, but: in Italian, ospite means both 'host' and 'guest'. In a given situation, you can't be both, so, (I guess) in a sense this word can be the<br class="">negation of itself.<br class="">Apologies, semantics is not my forte.<br class="">Best,<br class="">Giorgio<br class="">馬振國<br class="">2018-05-31 13:03 GMT+02:00 Mattis List <mattis.list@lingpy.org>:<br class=""> Wouldn't the frequent cases of pronouns or pronoun-like words in French<br class=""> (personne = "person, nobody", pas = "step, not", etc.) come close to<br class=""> this notion? And this process has historically also be claimed for other<br class=""> negation words, like Ancient Greek "ou", if I am not mistaken.<br class=""><br class=""> Best,<br class=""><br class=""> Mattis<br class=""><br class=""> On 2018-05-31 12:57, Joo Ian wrote:<br class=""> > Dear all,<br class=""> ><br class=""> > <br class=""> ><br class=""> > I would like to know if the following universal claim holds:<br class=""> ><br class=""> > <br class=""> ><br class=""> > /There exists no lexeme that can mean X and the negation of X. (For<br class=""> > example, no lexeme can express “to go” and “to not go”)./<br class=""> ><br class=""> > <br class=""> ><br class=""> > I wonder if such “bipolar polysemy” exists in any lexeme, because I<br class=""> > cannot think of any, and whether this claim is truly universal.<br class=""> ><br class=""> > I would appreciate to know if there is any counter-evidence.<br class=""> ><br class=""> > <br class=""> ><br class=""> > From Hong Kong,<br class=""> ><br class=""> > Ian Joo<br class=""> ><br class=""> > http://ianjoo.academia.edu<br class=""> ><br class=""> ><br class=""> ><br class=""> > _______________________________________________<br class=""> > Lingtyp mailing list<br class=""> > Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org<br class=""> > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp<br class=""> ><br class=""> _______________________________________________<br class=""> Lingtyp mailing list<br class=""> Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org<br class=""> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp<br class="">--<br class="">Prof. Dr. Giorgio Francesco Arcodia<br class="">馬振國博士 副教授<br class="">Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca<br class="">米蘭比克卡大學<br class="">Dipartimento di Scienze Umane per la Formazione<br class="">教育學系<br class="">Edificio U6 - stanza 4101<br class="">六號樓 4101室<br class="">Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo, 1<br class="">20126 Milano 意大利 米蘭<br class="">Tel.: (+39) 02 6448 4946[IMAGE](+39) 02 6448 4946<br class="">Fax: (+39) 02 6448 4863<br class="">E-mail: giorgio.arcodia@unimib.it<br class="">Website: http://www.bilgroup.it/it/info/giorgio-francesco-arcodia/<br class="">Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bicoccalanguage<br class="">_______________________________________________<br class="">Lingtyp mailing list<br class="">Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org<br class="">http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp<br class="">_______________________________________________<br class="">Lingtyp mailing list<br class="">Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org<br class="">http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp<br class=""></blockquote>_______________________________________________<br class="">Lingtyp mailing list<br class="">Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org<br class="">http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp<br class=""></div></div></blockquote></div><br class=""></body></html>