[Lingtyp] Lexical and Derived Antonymy Across Languages (Workshop at SLE 2027)

Wed Oct 14 08:16:16 UTC 2026

Dear all,
Matti Miestamo and I are proposing the following workshop for the coming SLE conference in Košice 25-28 August 2027

If you are interested please send us your 100-word abstract by November 10th.

All the best,
Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm

Lexical and Derived Antonymy Across Languages – Typological, Morphosyntactic, and Semantic Perspectives

Workshop proposal for the 60th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE2027), Košice 25-28 August 2027
Organizers: Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm (Stockholm University) & Matti Miestamo (University of Helsinki)

Antonymy – the semantic relation of oppositeness – is a fundamental organizing principle of human language and cognition. Languages express antonymic relations primarily through two strategies:

  1.  lexical antonymy: the use of distinct, non-derivationally related roots (e.g., good/bad, long/short).
  2.  derived (morphological) antonymy: the derivation of an opposite form from a base root via affixation or other morphological operations (e.g., English happy/unhappy, possible/impossible).
While antonymy has been extensively studied within fields such as semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and lexicology (see introductory chapter in Jones & al. 2012 for a useful overview), its cross-linguistic distribution and structural variation have only recently become the focus of systematic typological research. Koptjevskaja-Tamm et al. (2024) investigate the structural distribution of lexical versus derived antonymy across a broad cross-linguistic sample of property concepts. The study highlights that the choice between lexical and derived strategies is far from random, but is governed by systematic semantic, cognitive, and communicative principles (partly suggested already in Zimmer 1964): First, the asymmetric encoding of antonymic pairs often reflects opposition in evaluation  (positive vs. negative poles, e.g., ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’, ‘wise’ vs. ‘silly’) or magnitude (e.g., ‘big’ vs. ‘small’, ‘long’ vs. ‘short’). Property concepts denoting negative evaluation or smaller magnitude are more prone to be expressed through negative derivation than evaluatively positive ones and ones expressing larger magnitude. Secondly, core and partly also peripheral property concepts in the Dixonian (1977) sense (e.g., dimensions, age, physical properties) strongly favour distinct lexical forms, whereas other concepts (e.g., difficulty or complex evaluative properties) rely more heavily on derived strategies.
The study also brings out several other issues for future research. First, while some language families and macro-regions rely extensively on productive affixation to express oppositeness across property concepts, others lack morphological antonymy almost entirely or restrict it to very narrow lexical niches. Interestingly there are languages in which even some oppositions within physical dimension, which is one of the core semantic types, are expressed by negative derivation (Cable 2016, Krasnoukhova 2022). Such areal and genealogical clusterings generate questions about the typological predictors and diachronic stability of derived antonymic systems.
Second, morphological antonymy frequently intersects with grammatical negation strategies and word-formation rules, creating a continuum between purely lexical oppositions, morphological derivations, and syntactic constructions.
Third, in many languages, lexical and derived antonyms do not merely partition the lexicon, but actively compete or co-exist within the same semantic space, resulting in triads and even tetrads of antonyms with additional contrasts in functions and meanings. These include elaboration of gradability (e.g., Russian umnyj ‘clever’ – ne-glupyj ‘neg-stupid = fairly clever’ – ne-umnyj ‘neg-clever = fairly stupid’ – glupyj ‘stupid’), but also specialization of particular antonym forms for distinct word senses of the semantically unmarked counterpart (e.g., alive – dead – undead in English). This raises fundamental questions about blocking, semantic and pragmatic specialization, and register differences.
Building upon these insights, this workshop aims to bring together linguists working on individual languages, morphology, functional-typological linguistics, semantics and corpus linguistics to explore how languages across different language families and structural types partition their semantic space into lexical vs. derived oppositions, how morphological mechanisms interact with the lexical strategy, and what broader cognitive or communicative principles drive these cross-linguistic patterns.
We welcome submissions that address – but are not limited to – the following core research questions:

  *   How does a particular language (or language family) express antonymic relations within different semantic classes of property words – lexical vs. derived?
  *   For derived expression, what types of markers are deployed to express the relation of opposition – general negative markers, dedicated privative markers, etc?
  *   Do particular languages conform to the tendencies established in earlier research
     *   do core property concepts favour lexical antonymy?
     *   do property concepts denoting negative evaluation favour derived antonymy?
     *   do property concepts denoting smaller magnitude favour derived antonymy?
  *   What other types of observations regarding the expression of antonymy can be made in particular languages? How do different types of opposition (e.g., gradable antonyms like hot/cold vs. complementary opposites like dead/alive) impact whether a language permits derived forms alongside lexical ones?
  *   When both a lexical and a derived antonym exist in a language for one and the same concept, what governs the choice between them? Are there clear differences in corpus frequency? Do they differ in degree of scalarity, intensification, polite/euphemistic usage, or register?

  *   What is the relation between derivational expression of antonymy and the grammatical expression of clausal negation? In which semantic or pragmatic contexts do we encounter one or the other? Are there typological correlations between negation strategies and the prevalence of derived antonymy?
  *   Can diachronic developments from lexical to derived antonyms or vice versa be observed in particular languages? What semantic or pragmatic factors govern these developments? Does language contact play a role?
We invite contributions dealing with the above questions either in individual languages, specific areas or families, or more generally. Contributions addressing several of these questions in one language, resulting in an overview of antonymy in the language, will be especially welcome.
Please send your preliminary abstract of no more than 100 words to the workshop convenors (tamm at ling.su.se<mailto:tamm at ling.su.se>, matti.miestamo at helsinki.fi<mailto:matti.miestamo at helsinki.fi>) by 10 November 2026. Please include four to five keywords as well as your affiliation and email address. Your short abstract will be included in the workshop proposal and if the proposal is accepted, contributors will be asked to submit a 500-word abstract by 15 January 2027.

References

Cable, Seth. 2018. The good, the “not good”, and the “not pretty”: Negation in the negative predicates of Tlingit. Natural Language Semantics 26(3–4). 281–335. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-018-9147-1.

Dixon, R. M.W. 1977. Where have all the adjectives gone? Studies in Language 1. 19–80.

Jones, Steven, M. Lynne Murphy, Carita Paradis & Caroline Willners. 2012. Antonyms in English: Construals, constructions and canonicity. Cambridge: CUP. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139032384.
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria, Matti Miestamo & Carl Börstell. 2024. A cross-linguistic study of lexical and derived antonymy. Linguistics 62(6). 1417–1472. DOI: 10.1515/ling-2023-0140.
Krasnoukhova, Olga. 2022. Attributive modification in South American indigenous languages. Linguistics 60 (3). 745–807. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2020-0133

Zimmer, Karl E. 1964. Affixal negation in English and other languages: An investigation of restricted productivity. New York: Linguistic Circle of New York.

Prof. Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm
Dept. of linguistics, Stockholm university, 106 91, Stockholm, Sweden
Editor-in-chief of “Linguistic Typology”
Vice-President of Societas Linguistica Europaea
www.su.se/english/profiles/tamm-1.182300<http://www.su.se/english/profiles/tamm-1.182300>
tamm at ling.su.se<mailto:tamm at ling.su.se>

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