Antonymy is recognized as an important type of meaning relation in natural language, yet there are very few detailed empirical studies of the topic. Through an analysis of a corpus of forty-three contemporary English-language novels, Mettinger isolates ten syntactic frames within which antonyms are regularly found: these serve as a useful heuristic tool for eliciting opposites from texts. Arguing that there are two kinds of antonyms--systematic and non-systematic opposites--he analyzes numerous pairs of antonyms, highlighting an important semantic relationship.
