LINGUIST List 6.86

Sat 21 Jan 1995

Misc: Auto-antonymy, Conversation analysis

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1. Joel M. Hoffman, Auto-antonymy
2. "Li Wei", CA

-0600 (199501201229.HAA26983wor-srv.wam.umd.edu)

)In November, I posted a query about what I referred to as
)"auto-antonymy", the semantic state of a word being its own opposite,
)either changing its meaning through time or having two opposite meanings
)at the same time.

I was surprised to see two examples left off your list:

impregnable: able to impregnated or inable to be pregnated.

inflamable: not flamable (which was not its original meaning, because
there was no word "flamable") or able to be inflamed, flamable.

 -Joel
(joelwam.umd.edu)

Dear Linguists,
I'm posting this both to offer references I have received and to
request further information about recent critiques of Conversation
Analysis. I'm not interested in summaries of CA concepts and
procedures. I'm interested in more substantial evaluations of CA.

David Silverman & Jaber Gubrium: Competing Strategies for Analysing
the Contexts of Social Interaction (Sociological Inquiry, 1994 pp.
179-97)

Jack Bilmes' papers The Concept of Preference in Conversation
Analysis (Language in Society, 1988 pp.161-81), and "Why That Now?"
Two Kinds of Conversational Meaning (Discourse processes, 1985 pp.
319-55)

Section 12.4 of A. Duranti's chapter Ethnography of Speaking in
F. Newmeyer (ed) Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey Vol. IV contains
some important points.

I'd be interested to hear more from you all.

Li Wei
Department of Speech, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
E-mail: li.weinewcastle.ac.uk