206 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
Such intensifies are necessarily on a negotiated scale of meaning and speakers
project assumptions of their usability to describe situations, so much as to
say ‘for our purposes I am assuming very to be on the same level as frantically
or terribly’. Equally, if the existential paradigm permits a range of equivalence
or discourse synonymy for items, then relations of oppositeness ought to
reveal the same awareness and negotiability of sense and the ‘limits of the
moment’ within which items are to be understood.
Antonymy in discourse is slightly less straightforward than the relations
of sameness or synonymy. This is recognized within semantics. Lyons talks
of speakers drawing attention to the precise terms of reference for gradable
adjectives by clearly defining the relationship of an adjective to its potential
antonym. In the pair: ‘Is X a good chess player?’ ‘No, but he’s not bad
either’ the second speaker needs to avoid the implicature which would be
suggested by a simple ‘no’ (Lyons 1977:278). This type of signalling may
be interpreted as speakers clarifying the precise nature of the existential
paradigm within which notions of oppositeness (or potential oppositeness)
are operating. SSE data has examples of this. Opposites occur not merely
gratuitously but clearly as mutually defining terms within paradigms; the
mutually exclusive senses are ‘publicly exposed’:
14 A: //r he’s a THOUGHTful man, //r he’s NOT a HASty man //
(44:597)
Hasty is not a repetition of any previous occurrence. Here the referring
tones (fall—rises) project an assumption that the two extreme points are
shared points of reference or ‘common ground’ (Brazil 1985:109), further
reinforcing the view of the paradigm as an act of negotiation. (14) is,
again, not an isolated example: grow and diminish elsewhere occur in an
almost identical ‘paradigm-framing’ operation (156:247–9), and on other
occasions speakers reveal their awareness of the need to specify the position
of an item within the paradigm by paraphrasing with synonymy rather
than antonymy. Taglicht (1982) has observed the importance of oppositeness
as a ‘textual pragmatic concept’, making a distinction between primary
(inherent) opposites and secondary (discourse-circumstantial) opposites,
but the functions of oppositions of the kind alluded to in the present data
need more research; they clearly operate within paradigmatic bounds
conditioned by the context of interaction and play a key role in the fixing
of lexical meaning in discourse.
The last of the major lexical relations alluded to, inclusion, or discourse
hyponymy, has a significant role in the ‘packaging’ of unfolding information
in talk. Speakers may reiterate entities either in the form of a term of
greater specificity for which previously a superordinate term has sufficed,
or may do the reverse, renaming an entity or entities by an item of broader
or superordinate reference. Allerton (1978) has referred to the phenomenon
where an item is reiterated by a superordinate form and has pointed out