Linguistic Interviewing as a Method for Determining the Degree of Representativeness of Antonymous Pairs in the English Language

Abstract

In this article, the degree of representativeness of the examples (pairs of lexical units) which illustrate antonymous relations in the English language has been determined, utilizing the method of linguistic interviewing. The article presents the procedure and the results of the psycholinguistic experiment conducted. The peculiarities of the method of linguistic interviewing as a type of psycholinguistic experiment have been defined. A selection of antonymous pairs provided by leading linguists in the area of lexical semantics as illustrative examples in thirteen English-language linguistic works (monographs, textbooks and linguistic encyclopaedias) serves as the material for the experiment. All of the 101 respondents are scholars in the field of linguistics (Candidates and Doctors of Philological Sciences, as well as postgraduate students from the higher educational establishments of Ukraine), and are native speakers of Ukrainian, English being their first foreign language. In the experiment, the respondents were to identify which pairs of lexical items given in the list illustrate the relation of antonymy. Analyzing the results of linguistic interviewing, we were able to determine the pairs of antonyms with the highest and the lowest degrees of representativeness. The research demonstrated that gradable and complementary antonyms, mainly adjectives, have the highest degree of representativeness. In addition, we identified certain correlations with the results of linguistic interviewing conducted earlier, the respondents being linguistics scholars, including university and college professors, who are native speakers of English from five English-speaking countries.

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