More false morphologies

Mo Willems has an opposites book out, Opposites Attract, and the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh has a show about it, which has reminded me that there's an 'antonym blog' folder on my desktop with things I've not been posting here. 

So, for the sake of posting something, here are a couple more takes on a now-familiar kind of cartoon, where a series of letters that looks like a word within a word (but isn't a word within that word) is replaced by an opposite.  I need a name for these, so I can tag them all. Let's call them false-morphologies. Now that I've tagged them, you can find the others here. 

Alive - Not Alive

Dead/alive is often given as an example of complementary (or contradictory) antonymy. That's when if X is true, Y must be false and vice versa. If Lincoln is dead, then Lincoln is not alive. If Lincoln is alive, then Lincoln is not dead. Complementaries have no middle ground. You either are or you aren't.

But try to use dead/alive as an example in a classroom or a textbook, and someone will say "what about vampires?" For them, we have the category of the undead. Is dead the opposite of undead? Or is alive?  (I'll always answer such questions with 'depends on the context'.)

The supernatural aside, a complementary antonym pair is only complementary in the semantic domains to which they apply. My sofa is not alive, but that doesn't mean it's dead. Something has to have been alive to be dead, so the semantic domain for dead/alive (and even undead) is 'living things'.

Not or the prefix non- put things in contradictory (or complementary) relations to one another regardless of the semantic domain.

What xkcd gives us in this comic is alive/not-alive. But although there's a firm line between the two,  it treats both as gradable states, where prions and viruses are not alive, but rocks are really not alive. The upward scale seems to be based on animacy and perhaps similarity to humans, while the downward scale mixes up criteria a bit more. I'm not entirely sure that I consider a prion to less not-alive than a rock with a face. In terms of things I'm likely to worship, the rock with a face comes higher, and surely I'm more likely to worship the less not-alive?

Anyway, it's funny. Thanks, xkcd.

oh no - not oh no

Dinosaur Comics has a guest artist and a comic I love:

you're not wrong

One of the things I love about antonyms is how logically unnecessary they (theoretically) are. Antonyms are one of the first thing to go when people try to construct more 'logical' languages. For example, in Esperanto antonyms are mostly made by prefixing mal- (sana = 'healthy', malsana = 'sick') and un- in Ogden's Basic English ('sick' = unhealthy).  But in English, if we want an opposite for healthy, we've got a choice between:

syntactic negation: not healthy

morphological negation: unhealthy

lexical antonyms: sick, ill

 (And other things like in poor health.)

This is the beauty of natural language. It gives us choices, and, by choosing one of the options over the other, we implicitly communicate that the other options were less appropriate for what we wanted to communicate.  As discussed in the last post, when Alexander Chancellor calls a stereotype the opposite of the truth, it communicates something subtly different from a falsehood--possibly something about the culpability of those perpetuating the stereotype, possibly something else, leaving it up to the interpreter to enrich the meaning.

Anyhow, all this is what I was thinking about when I went to purchase a wrapped slice of ginger loaf at the cafe this morning and the following dialogue occurred:

Me: These are smaller than they used to be. 
Server:  You're not wrong.