Antonymy is recognized as an important type of meaning relation in natural language, yet there are very few detailed empirical studies of the topic. Through an analysis of a corpus of forty-three contemporary English-language novels, Mettinger isolates ten syntactic frames within which antonyms are regularly found: these serve as a useful heuristic tool for eliciting opposites from texts. Arguing that there are two kinds of antonyms--systematic and non-systematic opposites--he analyzes numerous pairs of antonyms, highlighting an important semantic relationship.

More than any other European language English has been shaped by its contacts with other languages such as Celtic, Latin, Scandinavian and French. This is true not only of the vocabulary, but also of morphology and even phonology and syntax. But also the contact between different varieties of English played an important role, especially in the shaping of the Englishes outside England. The papers contained in this volume deal with such contacts from various points of views. Major topics are: the restructuring of lexical fields by borrowing processes in Old, Middle and Early Modern English, the...