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Invented antonyms: Esperanto as a semantic lab

This paper uses Esperanto—a constructed language with transparent morphology but rich semantic-pragmatic components—to study antonymy and polarity. We investigate the distribution of the Esperanto antonymy morpheme ‘mal-’ (as in, for instance, ‘mal-alta’: antonym-tall, short) in a 4.3 million-word corpus, Tekstaro, and use it as an empirical basis to assess different theories of negative antonyms. Our methodology consists in investigating the extent to which the antonymy morpheme ‘mal-’, which we take to denote negative polarity, bears the linguistic features predicted by traditional linguistic tests (such as incompatibility with measure and ratio phrases and low likelihood of nominalisation).