Annotated data of English antonyms

The data set consists of a good 500 randomly selected occurrences of each of the above adjectives in their contexts in the BNC (British National Corpus) (some 21,000 occurrences in total). The UNIX command grep was used to retrieve the sentences containing the target words tagged as adjectives in the BNC, and the nominal heads of the adjectives were then identified using a head finder script. The sentence in the written part of the corpus data and the corresponding chunk for the spoken occurrences for each of the adjectives were imported into FileMaker Pro and the adjectives were then manually coded.

The methodological procedure used in the analysis of the data proceeds from the lexical items in each case to their actual discursive interpretations in context, i.e., from lexical items to their contextual readings. For instance, if the actual reading of say short report refers to the paper copy, it was analyzed as a concrete object since its basic domain of instantiation is space/concrete object, and if it refers to the content it was coded in its domain of instantiation which is neither space nor time, but abstract/mental space. Crucially, this method then also involves a close analysis of the combining nominals and the meanings they express in each instance. The method of identifying discursive meanings of the antonymic word pairs in their contexts serves to make it possible to make generalizations across the interpretations of the lexical items rather than focusing on the lexical items as such without taking their meanings into account.

本数据集包含英国国家语料库（British National Corpus, BNC）中上述各形容词在语境下的足足500条随机选取的用例，总用例数约21000条。研究人员使用UNIX命令grep检索该语料库中被标注为形容词的目标词所在句子，随后通过中心词识别脚本（head finder script）确定这些形容词所修饰的名词中心语。将语料库书面部分的句子，以及各形容词对应的口语用例的对应语块，导入FileMaker Pro软件中，随后对这些形容词开展人工编码。

本数据集分析所采用的方法论流程，遵循从具体词汇项到其语境下实际话语阐释的路径，即从词汇项到其语境解读的分析逻辑。例如，若“short report（简短报告）”的实际语义指向纸质副本，则将其分析为具体实体，因其基本例示域为空间/具体实体范畴；若其语义指向内容本身，则将其编码至既非空间亦非时间，而是抽象/心理空间的例示域中。尤为关键的是，该方法还需对每个实例中搭配的名词及其所表达的语义进行细致分析。通过识别反义词对在语境中的话语语义，该方法得以实现对词汇项各类解读的跨案例归纳，而非脱离语义本身仅聚焦于词汇项本身。