ALRJournal. 2021; 5(2): 101-112 | DOI: 10.14744/alrj.2020.03780

Ancillary Antonyms: Syntagms and Paradigms from Arabic

Hamada S. A. Hassanein, Mohammad Abdoh Mahzari
Department of English Language and Literature, Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University, Alkharj, Saudi Arabia

This article seeks to identify and exemplify the central role of Jones’s (2002) ancillary antonymy in signaling, sharpening and triggering a range of canonical, semicanonical and noncanonical oppositions in discourse, as well as spinning and weaving a web of lexical-semantic relations between these paired oppositions. The specific objective is to quantify and qualify the syntagmatic combinations and paradigmatic selections of ancillary oppositions and the lexical-semantic relations they hold in between in Arabic paremiographical discourse. To fulfill this objective, the study builds on Jones’s (2002) model of ancillary antonymy, testing it quantilitatively against a representative dataset collected manually from a compilation of Arabic paremiography. Findings reveal nine paradigmatic choices and eight syntagmatic chains of ancillary oppositions in Arabic proverbs, which hold in between hyponymous, meronymous, analogous and duplicate relations and which range in a graded cline from full canonicity via partial canonicity to noncanonicity. The typology devised in this study might serve as an analytic toolkit for ancillarity use across languages and cultures.

Keywords: ancillarity, antonymity, (non)canonicity, paradigms, syntagms

Keywords: ancillarity, antonymity, (non)canonicity, paradigms, syntagms

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