Types of Oppositions

• Privative oppositions (contrasted to equipollent)
  • Two elements are opposed as a pair
  • One is more general in meaning, the second has some additional element of meaning
  • Example:
    • actor vs. actress
    • poet vs. poetess
    • nurse vs. male nurse
  • Of course, not all oppositions are privative:
    • dog vs. cat
    • boy vs. girl
    • red vs. orange vs. yellow vs. green vs. blue vs. indigo vs. violet
    • poodle vs. great dane vs. dachsund vs. rottweiler vs. chihuahua vs. st. bernard vs. ...
  • Such oppositions are said to be equipollent (= equal poles)
  • Privative oppositions must be binary; equipollent oppositions may relate any number of elements
• Privative oppositions may be extended to grammar:
  • Past vs. present tense
    • past tense means "happened before the time of speaking"
    • present tense does NOT necessarily mean "happens at the moment of speaking"
  • what does it mean? Singular vs. plural
    • Privative or equipollent?
    • If equipollent, singular = only one entity, plural = more than one entity
    • If privative, one has a specific meaning, the other does not.
• Polar vs. scalar oppositions
  • In a scalar opposition, the entire range of possibilities between endpoints is available
  • In a polar opposition, only the endpoints come into play

  Scalar	Polar
  hot vs. cold	freezing vs. boiling
  bright light vs. dim light	lights on vs. lights off
  good shape vs. bad shape	broken vs. operable
  cheap vs. expensive	free vs. $1,000,000
  good movie vs. bad movie	Razzie award vs. Oscar

• Digital vs. scalar presentation of information
  • Digital representations break information up into small pieces with specific, finite values (parallel to polar oppositions)
  • Analog representations are like scalar oppositions in that the information is in infinitely variable representation
  • Examples:
    • Video/film as a digital representation of a continuous event
    • Digital clock vs. analog clock (but consider the older style of digital clock with flaps that fall down for each minute/hour; here it is in the movie Groundhog Day)
    • Point graph (ex 1, ex 2) vs. continuous line graph
  • Note: it is possible to make perfect, identical copies of digital information, but not of analog information