binary opposition

The topic binary opposition is discussed in the following articles:

role in language

  • TITLE: language
    SECTION: Language and conceptualization
    It has been maintained that the human brain has a preference for binary oppositions, or polarities. If this is so, it will help explain the numerous pairs of related antonyms that are found: good, bad; hot, cold; high, low; right, wrong; dark, light; and so on. For finer discriminations, these terms can be put into more narrowly specified fields containing...

use in description of phonological patterns

  • TITLE: phonetics (linguistics)
    SECTION: Chomsky–Halle features
    Some of the binary features proposed by Chomsky and Halle are listed in Table 1. The first group comprises major class features, because these features are required for dividing sounds into classes such as vowels, consonants, and semivowels. There are several problems in giving satisfactory definitions of the phonetic properties of these features, but there is no doubt that binary oppositions...