This paper highlights the potential usefulness of
combining corpus methods and experimental
methods to gain new theoretical insights into th
e role of antonymy as an organizing lexico-
semantic principle in human thinking and langua
ges’ vocabularies. We are intrigued by what
distinguishes so-called ca
nonical antonyms such as
good-bad
,
long-short
,
thin-thick
from
other types of contrasts such as
cold-scorching
,
pale-dark
and
speedy-slow