37.3385, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2027: Lexical and Derived Antonymy Across Languages – Typological, Morphosyntactic, and Semantic Perspectives (Slovakia)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3385. Mon Oct 19 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3385, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2027: Lexical and Derived Antonymy Across Languages – Typological, Morphosyntactic, and Semantic Perspectives (Slovakia)

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Date: 15-Oct-2026
From: Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm [tamm at ling.su.se]
Subject: Workshop at SLE 2027: Lexical and Derived Antonymy Across Languages – Typological, Morphosyntactic, and Semantic Perspectives


Workshop at SLE 2027: Lexical and Derived Antonymy Across Languages –
Typological, Morphosyntactic, and Semantic Perspectives
Short Title: SLE 2027
Theme: Lexical and Derived Antonymy Across Languages – Typological,
Morphosyntactic, and Semantic Perspectives

Date: 25-Aug-2027 - 28-Aug-2027
Location: Košice, Slovakia
Contact: Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm
Contact Email: tamm at ling.su.se
Meeting URL: https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2027/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Morphology; Pragmatics;
Semantics; Typology

Submission Deadline: 10-Nov-2026

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:
 - lexical antonymy: the use of distinct, non-derivationally related
roots (e.g., good/bad, long/short).
 - 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, 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 (selected):
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.



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