Antonyms and Paradoxes

Abstract

Adjectives can be gradable or non-gradable and this aspect of their meaning is responsible for their different distribution and also for their classification into two different classes of antonyms. Non-gradable antonyms are called contradictories: they are neither true nor false together and exclude any middle term; gradable antonyms are called contraries: they are not simultaneously true, but may be simultaneously false. While with contraries a negative disjunction (neque...neque) can define an intermediate level, with contradictories it simply means that either term of the disjunction is excluded. There are however some Latin examples, such as neque vivus neque mortuus (`neither alive nor dead'), where the negation of a contradictory pair is used to convey a third, intermediate value. This third possibility is precisely what gives place to a paradox. Such an intermediate level can be defined also by terms like semivivus, semianimis (`half-dead'). Following Ducrot's theory on argumentation, such terms represent an argumentative attenuation, not with respect to life, rather with respect to death. With contradictories, in fact, the use of semi-, like the use of negation, gives the assertion of the opposite term as a result.