Complementary antonyms and a good lecturer

[cosmolinguist]

Slogging through a semantics lecture (still loads of new words, I still don't feel like I'm understanding anything...though it's better on recordings than actually attending the class because I can pause it, catch up with my notes and sort of give my brain a chance to digest one bit before the next comes along, which is worth it even if it does take me an hour and a half to get through an hour lecture).

Today I'm learning about Paradigmatic Relationships. Which includes among other things different kinds of antonyms (antonyms you might have learned about in school; they're opposite words), and one of those kinds is complementary antonyms. The first kind we learned about are gradable antonyms, which are kind of on a spectrum and contain the possibility of something being neither. Like war and peace, or big and small. These complementary ones are like that except there's no middle, neither-one-thing-nor-the-other state.

Except I'm not sure it exists, at least in English, because all of the examples suck. They're things like "indoors/outdoors" or "pass/fail" (which my school (maybe my whole university) has a scheme for "compensatable fail" so you can still pass even if you've technically failed in certain circumstances).

And the last example actually made my jaw drop, it was "male/female." I just...forget people still think this way. But my lecturer had included it in the "problematic examples" list and said "Another pair that usually gets cited quite unthinkingly by semanticists is male and female. That means they haven't followed any real-world debates in the last twenty years or so." That made me smile.

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

You can't say it's not a wide-ranging lecture, though. I've also learned that ducks aren't the only thing that "quack" in German, frogs do too!

And when informed by a class in Britain that frogs don't, our (native German speaking) lecturer asked what they do then and everybody said "croak"! Do frogs croak in BrE? I never knew this.

I'm not sure what I would say they do, though, as of course the canonical American example of a frog noise is "ribbit" because even though frogs make all different noises, that's the noise of a frog that lives near Hollywood and so it ended up in cartoons and thus people like me grew up thinking that's the noise frogs make. But anyway what I mean hear is I'm not sure I've ever heard or would like "ribbit" used as a verb. Frogs say ribbit (canonically, don't @ me, scientists) but I don't like it as a verb, "frogs ribbit," even though I'm fine with "horses neigh" or "ducks quack."

Hm...

[ludy]

(At least in the varieties of British English that I speak) It's like dogs bark and when they bark they say "woof". Frogs croak and their croak says "ribbit"
(Now i'm trying to think of any other animals that have a different verb for their speech. And remembering the Speech Therapy trick of telling Smalls a silent animal like a butterfly says "fffff"to get them to practice that difficult-to-make-with-a-Small's-mouth phoneme)

[cosmolinguist]

It's like dogs bark and when they bark they say "woof". Frogs croak and their croak says "ribbit"

Ah, that makes sense, thank you!

[rmc28]

Yes! That's exactly it (in my varieties of British English).

Pigs grunt and their grunts say "oink".
Chickens cluck and their clucking says [cannot work out how to transcribe sound].

[cosmolinguist]

I understand the principle for other animals (sheep bleat and they say "baa"), it just occurred to me that I don't think I have a verb for what frogs do, so maybe that's why "croak" seemed weird to me.

[silveradept]

Glad that your professor, at least, has been keeping up with the debates of the past few decades.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, she mentioned something reinforcing this again in today's lecture so clearly she really does get it. It was oddly more encouraging to me than I'd expect.

[jesse_the_k]

Nothing odd in being seen!

[sfred]

<3

[finding_helena]

On or off is one. A light is either on or it's off. There's no in between. Alive or dead, you could argue someone who is decompensating rapidly as dying, but they're still alive up until they're not.