Computing Lexical Contrast
Table 5: Percentage of contrasting word pairs belonging to various sub-types. The sub-type “reversives" applies only to verbs. The sub-type “gradable" applies only to adjectives and adverbs.
['sub-type', 'basis', 'adv.', 'adj.', 'nouns', 'verbs']
Observe that rows for all categories other than the disjoints have percentages greater than 60%. This means that a number of contrasting word pairs can be classified into more than one kind. Complementaries are the most common kind in case of adverbs, nouns, and verbs, whereas antipodals are most common among adjectives. A majority of the adjective and adverb contrasting pairs are gradable, but more than 30% of the pairs are not. Most of the verb pairs are reversives (91.6%). Disjoint pairs are much less common than all the other categories considered, and they are most prominent among adjectives (28%), and least among verb pairs (1.7%).