Re: Two different opposites

On Mon, Jan 12, 2004 at 09:43:49AM -0800, Gary Shannon wrote:

> It's interesting that there can sometimes be more than
> one "opposite" to a word.  [...]
>
> consider these opposites:
>
> take <-> not take (refuse)
> take <-> untake (give)
>
> [...] Yet in
> other cases these two different opposites really mean
> about the same thing:
>
> welcome <-> not welcome
> welcome <-> unwelcome
I think the difference here is between active and stative.

"Un-" refers to a change of state happening backwards.  In change-of-state
verbs, like "take", "un-" shows the action happening in reverse; "not"
shows the action not happening at all, which is then a stative situation
of not taking.

In stative verbs like "be welcome", the reverse-change-of-state meaning
of "un-" does not operate unless specifically invoked "made him feel
unwelcome".  "Un-" would work if you changed your stative verb "be
welcome" to an active one "make (someone) welcome".

I can envision a language in which this set of operations is not a
triangle, but three sides of a square.  Imagine that "take" is the opposite
of "un-take", and there is a stative verb form "be taken" which is the
opposite of "not be taken"; and then this language would form a statement
using "not be taken" whenever they wanted to say "not take".

Amanda