Oxymorons: a Preliminary Corpus Investigation
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Oxymorons: a preliminary corpus investigation Marta La Pietra Francesca Masini University of Bologna Alumna University of Bologna [email protected] [email protected] Abstract oxymora requires that people access relevant world knowledge to constrain their creative This paper contains a preliminary corpus interpretations of seemingly contradictory study of oxymorons, a figure of speech so concepts”. far under-investigated in NLP-oriented In this paper, we set out a preliminary research. The study resulted in a list of 376 oxymorons, identified by extracting a set of investigation of oxymorons based on naturally antonymous pairs (under various occurring data from Italian, with a view to configurations) from corpora of written contributing to the NLP-oriented research on Italian and by manually checking the figurative language by supplying an initial list of results. A complementary method is also oxymorons and oxymoronic structures that can be envisaged for discovering contextual used for further analyses and for evaluation tasks. oxymorons, which are highly relevant for The questions that drove our investigation are: the detection of humor, irony and sarcasm. What kind of oxymorons do we find in common language? What syntactic constructions are 1 Why oxymorons? involved in their creation? And above all, how can The growing body of research on figurative we detect them in corpora? language in NLP has recently witnessed an In Section 2 we describe the methodology we expansion from more traditional domains (like used to detect oxymorons in corpora of idioms, metaphors, metonymy) to other contemporary written Italian. Although our study ubiquitous phenomena such as irony, puns and is based on Italian, the procedure we followed can sarcasm. However, other – supposedly more easily be extended to other languages. In Section marginal – figures of speech have received less 3 we illustrate the main results of our analysis. The attention so far. The oxymoron is a case in point. full list of oxymorons detected is available in the The oxymoron, which has been studied mainly Appendix. Section 4 outlines another promising in rhetoric and literature, is “[a] figure of speech in complementary methodology to be pursued in which a pair of opposed or markedly contradictory future research. Finally, Section 5 discusses terms are placed in conjunction for emphasis”, possible further developments, with special although its meaning has expanded to comprise attention to the challenges oxymorons pose for more generally “a contradiction in terms” automatic identification and extraction. (definitions from OED: www.oed.com). Typical examples of oxymorons would be deafening 2 Methodology silence, sweet sorrow or awfully good. The procedure we devised to track down The oxymoron is obviously closely oxymorons in corpora of written Italian stems from intertwined with the semantic relation of the observation that these constructions are closely antonymy: it is often the union of antonymous connected with antonymous pairs, which have items that creates the oxymoron’s paradoxical been the subject of several studies based on their effect, thus generating a new meaning, which co-occurrence in texts (cf. e.g. Charles & Miller often heavily depends on context. As Gibbs & 1989; Justeson & Katz 1991; Lobanova 2012; Kearney (1994: 86) observe, “[u]nderstanding Kostić 2017). 176 Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Figurative Language Processing, pages 176–185 July 9, 2020. c 2020 Association for Computational Linguistics https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P17 Our starting point was Jones’ (2002) analysis of odiato ‘hated love’, where odiato is the past English antonyms, which makes use of a list of participle of odiare ‘to hate’). canonical antonymous pairs to be searched in a Second, we added contrastive adjective ~ corpus of texts from The Independent (approx. adverb pairs connected to the nouns in Table 1 (e.g. 280M words). We therefore translated Jones’ felicità ‘happiness’ > felice ‘happy’ > felicemente antonymous pairs into Italian and made a selection ‘happily’ + infelicità > infelice ‘unhappy’, gaining out of this set, driven mainly by the exclusion of felicemente infelice ‘happily unhappy’). predicative (e.g. confirm ~ deny) and adverbial In addition, to enrich data retrieval, we selected (e.g. badly ~ well) couples. lexemes semantically related to the members of the This resulted in a list of 17 noun ~ noun antonymous pairs in Table 1 (synonyms, antonymous pairs, displayed in Table 1. hyponyms, etc.) from the Grande Dizionario Analogico della Lingua Italiana (Simone 2010). Italian antonymous English translation This step was inspired by Shen’s (1987: 109) pairs definition of indirect oxymoron, i.e. an oxymoron amore ~ odio love ~ hate where “one of [the] two terms is not the direct attività ~ passività activity ~ passivity caldo ~ freddo hot ~ cold antonym of the other, but rather the hyponym of its coraggio ~ paura bravery ~ fear antonym” (like whistling silence, where whistling distanza ~ vicinanza distance ~ proximity is a type of noise). Related lexemes were also dolcezza ~ amarezza sweetness ~ bitterness searched in the two above-mentioned corpora. For felicità ~ infelicità happiness ~ unhappiness giustizia ~ ingiustizia justice ~ injustice the sake of exemplification, we illustrate some of guerra ~ pace war ~ peace these paradigmatic expansions for the following leggerezza ~ pesantezza lightness ~ heaviness three antonymous pairs, for which we retrieved a lentezza ~ velocità slowness ~ speed considerable amount of data: luce ~ buio light ~ dark realtà ~ irrealtà reality ~ unreality caldo ~ freddo (hot ~ cold) → afa ricchezza ~ povertà wealth ~ poverty silenzio ~ rumore silence ~ noise ‘stuffiness’, calura ‘heat’, fuoco ‘fire’, vita ~ morte life ~ death fiamma ‘flame’ ~ gelo ‘frost’, ghiaccio ‘ice’, vuoto ~ pieno emptiness ~ fullness grandine ‘hail’, neve ‘snow’, pioggia ‘rain’; Table 1: Starting list of Italian antonymous pairs. felicità ~ infelicità (happiness ~ unhappiness) → allegria ‘glee’, contentezza ‘cheer’, Then we designed an inventory of potential gaiezza ‘gaiety’, gioia ‘joy’ ~ afflizione oxymorons. All the constructed couples were ‘distress’, depressione ‘depression’, searched, as lemmas, in two large corpora of disperazione ‘despair’, dolore ‘pain’, contemporary written Italian: Italian Web 2016 sconforto ‘discouragement’, scontento (itTenTen16, through the SketchEngine platform: ‘discontentment’, tristezza ‘sadness’; https://www.sketchengine.eu/) and CORIS (2017 version; Rossini Favretti et al. 2002; silenzio ~ rumore (silence ~ noise) → http://corpora.ficlit.unibo.it/coris [silenzio only] ~ boato ‘rumble’, fracasso _eng.html). The results were manually checked. ‘racket’, fragore ‘clamour’, grido ‘shout’, ululato ‘howling’, urlo ‘scream’. The above-mentioned inventory of potential oxymorons was built in the following way. The final phase of the analysis implied the First, we matched each noun of each pair (e.g. interrogation of the Sketch Engine Word Sketch odio ‘hate’) with its antonym (amore ‘love’) in tool, which describes the collocational behavior either adjectival (amoroso / amorevole ‘loving’) or of words by showing the lexemes that most verbal (amare ‘to love’) form. With this first round typically co-occur with them, within specific of extractions, we obtained combinations such as syntagmatic contexts, by using statistical odio amoroso (lit. hate lovely) and amorevole odio association measures. In this case, we searched (lit. lovely hate) ‘loving hate’, as well as l’amore for all nouns participating in the antonymous pairs odia ‘love hates’, although sequences containing in Table 1 and we manually revised all top results verbs were quite uncommon. However, the search provided the Word Sketch function (thus focusing for lemma verbs retrieved also a number of on the most statistically significant participial forms used as adjectives (as in amore combinations). Beside oxymorons that we had 177 already retrieved with the previous procedure As expected, the vast majority of the oxymorons in (e.g. the very frequent silenzio assordante our dataset belongs to noun-adjective ‘deafening silence’), this method allowed us to combinations, in both orders: [N A] (e.g. silenzio identify new configurations, for instance urlante ‘screaming silence’, attività passive sentential patterns where the two opposite nouns ‘passive activities’) and [A N] (e.g. raggiante are linked by the copula è ‘is’ (e.g. la luce è oscurità ‘glowing darkness’, disperata felicità tenebra ‘light is darkness’) or prepositional ‘desperate happiness’). These are the only two phrases where the two opposite nouns are linked structures that host oxymorons generated from all by a preposition (e.g. il fragore del silenzio ‘the the 17 antonymous pairs in Table 1. In our data, [A racket of silence’). N] sequences are quite numerous despite the fact that noun-adjective is the unmarked, neutral order 3 Results in Italian. This may be linked to the fact that the prenominal position for Italian adjectives is The multiple-step procedure described in Section 2 generally associated with affect and emphasis resulted in a final list of 376 oxymorons, the first (Ramaglia 2010), values that are highly compatible of its kind in Italian, to the best of our knowledge. with the oxymoron as a rhetorical device. Several The full dataset (Italian oxymorons 1.0) is examples in these two classes display participial provided in the Appendix and released as an Excel forms used in adjectival