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From: arnold@ucsfcgl.UUCP (Ken Arnold%CGL)
Newsgroups: net.nlang,net.puzzle
Subject: Re: words and their opposites
Message-ID: <526@ucsfcgl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 5-Jun-85 20:29:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucsfcgl.526
Posted: Wed Jun  5 20:29:49 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 9-Jun-85 04:16:58 EDT
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Organization: UCSF Computer Graphics Lab
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In article <1542@orca.UUCP> todds@orca.UUCP (Todd Stewart) writes:
>> > 	We chop trees DOWN and then we chop them UP !
>> My French teacher told us that when he was teaching English in France,
>> his students just couldn't understand why "THE HOUSE BURNED DOWN" means
>> exactly the same thing as "THE HOUSE BURNED UP."
>Doesn't the UP imply that the house was consumed by the fire, while
>the DOWN implies that the house was leveled (razed, given 0 height (-:
>).  I suspect that the distinction is similar for the tree-chopping
>example.

The only generally available (and even then not very generally) work
on this field is "Metaphors We Live By", by G. Lakehoff and sombody
(my copy is at home; I can provide more particulars on request).
Unfortuantely, this form of trailing modifier (whose technical name
escapes me) is not very well covered in the book; the field of language
metaphor is rather recent.

Todd's summary for this is basically right.  Unfortunately describing
how these metaphors seem to work is best done with pictures, not words,
so until everybody gets a standard graphics scope on their desk to read
news with....

One of the more fascinating things is how the opposites you normally
associate with a word are sometimes wrong.  For example the opposite
of "out" is "in", is it not?
		We rolled the carpet out.
		We rolled the carpet up.
Well, maybe not always...

		Ken Arnold