Unit 11: Words in Sets

(Comments on Activities)

Activity 1

There are no right or wrong answers here. Some of the possible relations which people carry in their heads are shown below, but there may well be more. These are decontextualised relations, and may well be quite different when the words are applied in context. See the Unit for further discussion of this point.

Co-hyponyms may be words such as black/white (both colours), horn/antler (both??? - there appears to be no superordinate term in this case, yet intuitively they are related).

Activity 2

This passage has been much discussed. It is relatively easy to pick out the obvious antonyms, e.g. best / worst, belief / incredulity, Light / Darkness, etc. Some of the oppositions are less immediately expected. The opposite of winter here is spring, and quite rightly so, one might think, in view of the opposition between despair and hope. Summer would not fit half as well. Sometimes the direct antonym is avoided, the opposite of Heaven for example. Is this squeamishness, a desire to avoid mentioning what had so clearly been predicted, or what?

In the second paragraph, having set up the reader's expectations of contrast, Dickens then uses what is actually a well-known music-hall technique. Instead of giving us the expected contrast, he surprises us by giving us the same fact about the two countries, initially, (King with large jaw) and then gives us the contrast with the faces of the two Queens. Reading this sentence aloud presents some interesting problems of pausing and intonation.

Activity 3

Detailed analysis of vocabulary means looking at individual words, their meaning, their use and their effect in context. These notes concentrate on some of the actual words and what they mean and contribute to the passages on marriage. They deal less with the authorial intentions, but there are a few comments in this area as well.

Passage A

The passage consists of an extended contrast between something perceived as controllable to a degree (contrary to popular belief), i.e. marriage, and something which is a gamble, and therefore uncontrollable (again contrary to popular belief), i.e. children. The words through which this contrast is first established and then developed fall into two broad semantic categories, which we can summarise as "control" and "uncertainty". The second of these is much more diversely exploited than the first. Under the first heading, we can list control, mould and shape. Under the second, we can list gamble, foolhardy, surprised, helplessness, dangerous, random, fortune and arbitrary. These run like a thread through the text, providing a sense of coherence and development.

Alongside this primary contrast, there is the related contrast of "romance" vs. "not romance / intelligent choice". This is interwoven with the primary contrast, so that for most of the passage "romance" is associated with "uncertainty". In 1.2, romantic and intelligent are treated as antonyms in the context, even though we might not normally think of them as antonyms. This opposition is immediately reinforced by foolhardy, which, in one word, unites the two elements of romance already suggested, namely risk and lack of intelligence.

By the end of the passage ,though, the concept of "romance" has been dissected, since it is children who are described as "life's great romance" while we, by contrast, have control over our "romantic love". So the word romantic has lost its association with uncertainty, and been reclassified as something controllable. This significantly contributes to the ironic thrust of the passage.

Words which further support the contrasts noted above are, for example, loving and careful. These would not usually be regarded as antonymous, although they seem to be here. Since careful, in its most literal interpretation, means "having care for someone", it is rather shocking to find it opposed to loving. This is not all. There is a further contrast between "expectation" and "demand". One sense of expect is indeed demand; but we do not get the feeling that the two are synonymous here. Another sense of expect is anticipate / predict - an element of calculation is surely involved. Demand, on the other hand, suggests impulse. So, we have loving put forward as something which can be predicted or calculated, and careful as something subject to (impulsive) demand. Possibly the writing is too clever, but it does seem clear that the intention here is to paint a picture of a cold, analytical, and rather unloving narrator, and this is achieved by an intricate set of meaning oppositions.

The passage contains further instances of antonymy of a more conventional kind, e.g. illnesses / health, choose / not choose. The sentence at the end of the second paragraph merits special comment for its use of both antonymy and synonymy. The parallelism between the two halves of the sentence is not exact, since the second half also includes the word dangerous. This makes the parallelism more effective, though, since it reminds us of the main contrast between "control" and "uncertainty".

The passage as a whole is apparently personalised, even conversational. Mention of the narrator's wife by name, use of first person pronouns and possessives, and one-word sentences such as 'No' all contribute to this effect. It seems likely that this is more a literary device than a real attempt to engage readers with facts - no newspaper columnist would really refer to his wife in this way, for example. The overall purpose is evidently literary, and therefore, to amuse and possibly instruct, depending on your view...!

Passage B.

This is a factual exposition, typical of an encyclopaedia entry. The boldface opening caption and definition-style first sentence make this apparent from the outset, and the further development of points reinforces it. Since the purpose is to define various forms of marriage, and restrictions on marriage, there are plenty of low-frequency, semi-technical terms, for which one-word synonyms arc unlikely to exist, e.g. polyandry. The purpose of definition is to explain, and while a well-chosen synonym can help in this purpose, there is usually none available.

Classification and exemplification inevitably entail hyponymous relationships, and the first sentence establishes a relationship between the superordinate term marriage and its hyponyms: monogamy, polygamy and polyandry. The same technique is immediately applied again to the "basis of marriage", which is expanded into romantic and arranged.

We can return to Passage A briefly to reconsider the treatment of romantic there. The initial opposition there was between "uncertainty" and "control". The word was then reclassified as something subject to control. In Passage B it is still subject to control, but not of the participant in the marriage. Thus we have a complex pattern of antonymy for the word romantic, which shifts according to context.

Further down in the passage we have examples such as: restrictive factors (superordinate term) followed by a set of co-hyponymous items. The word factor itself is highly typical of expository text of this kind, serving not only as a superordinate in the manner just described, but also as a means of setting up reader expectations and thus organising the ensuing discourse.

Text of this kind also deals in binomial or heavily cumulative expressions, e.g. ceremonies. contracts or customs, rights or duties, care and protection, cultures and communities, conventions and laws, forbidden or enjoined. The parts of each expression are sometimes near synonyms (care and protection), sometimes co-hyponyms, and sometimes antonyms (rights and duties). Sometimes they have almost the status of a fixed phrase, possibly enshrined in the ceremonial side of marriage itself (care and protection.). The probable effect is to lend weight, suggesting comprehensiveness of treatment.

The text also repeats words frequently enough for it not to be accidental, e.g. family line / family property / family consent. The word marriage appears eight times. This may just be a feature of the subject matter, but it is noticeably different from Passage A where even central items such as marriage and children each appear just twice. Factual text is less constrained by a requirement to appeal to the reader's imagination, and connections between one part of a text and another are explicit. Literary text will usually seek to avoid overt repetition, which might be seen as superfluous to the intended effect. Partial repetition or paraphrase is preferred.

An interesting example of lexical choice occurs near the end of the passage. The writer is explaining the factor of colour as a restriction on choice of marriage partner, and opposes white with black and then with Asian. Such oppositions are commonly made, and have become de facto antonyms for many people. It may be worth reminding ourselves that these apparently stable lexical relations are more a reflection of social reality than of physical reality.