O xymorons: a preliminary corpus investigation (2020)

Abstract: This paper contains a preliminary corpus study of oxymorons, a figure of speech so far under-investigated in NLP-oriented research. The study resulted in a list of 376 oxymorons, identified by extracting a set of antonymous pairs (under various configurations) from corpora of written Italian and by manually checking the results. A complementary method is also envisaged for discovering contextual oxymorons, which are highly relevant for the detection of humor, irony and sarcasm.

## why oxymorons? the growing body of research on figurative language in nlp has recently witnessed an expansion from more traditional domains (like idioms, metaphors, metonymy) to other ubiquitous phenomena such as irony, puns and sarcasm. however, other -supposedly more marginal -figures of speech have received less attention so far. the oxymoron is a case in point. the oxymoron, which has been studied mainly in rhetoric and literature, is "[a] figure of speech in which a pair of opposed or markedly contradictory terms are placed in conjunction for emphasis", although its meaning has expanded to comprise more generally "a contradiction in terms" (definitions from oed: www.oed.com ). typical examples of oxymorons would be deafening silence, sweet sorrow or awfully good. the oxymoron is obviously closely intertwined with the semantic relation of antonymy: it is often the union of antonymous items that creates the oxymoron's paradoxical effect, thus generating a new meaning, which often heavily depends on context. as @xcite observe, " @xcite nderstanding oxymora requires that people access relevant world knowledge to constrain their creative interpretations of seemingly contradictory concepts". in this paper, we set out a preliminary investigation of oxymorons based on naturally occurring data from italian, with a view to contributing to the nlp-oriented research on figurative language by supplying an initial list of oxymorons and oxymoronic structures that can be used for further analyses and for evaluation tasks. the questions that drove our investigation are: what kind of oxymorons do we find in common language? what syntactic constructions are involved in their creation? and above all, how can we detect them in corpora? in section 2 we describe the methodology we used to detect oxymorons in corpora of contemporary written italian. although our study is based on italian, the procedure we followed can easily be extended to other languages. in section 3 we illustrate the main results of our analysis. the full list of oxymorons detected is available in the appendix. section 4 outlines another promising complementary methodology to be pursued in future research. finally, section 5 discusses possible further developments, with special attention to the challenges oxymorons pose for automatic identification and extraction. ## methodology the procedure we devised to track down oxymorons in corpora of written italian stems from the observation that these constructions are closely connected with antonymous pairs, which have been the subject of several studies based on their co-occurrence in texts (cf. e.g. @xcite @xcite . our starting point was jones @xcite analysis of english antonyms, which makes use of a list of canonical antonymous pairs to be searched in a corpus of texts from the independent (approx. 280m words). we therefore translated jones' antonymous pairs into italian and made a selection out of this set, driven mainly by the exclusion of predicative (e.g. confirm ~ deny) and adverbial (e.g. badly ~ well) couples. this resulted in a list of 17 noun ~ noun antonymous pairs, displayed in first, we matched each noun of each pair (e.g. odio 'hate') with its antonym (amore 'love') in either adjectival (amoroso / amorevole 'loving') or verbal (amare 'to love') form. with this first round of extractions, we obtained combinations such as odio amoroso (lit. hate lovely) and amorevole odio (lit. lovely hate) 'loving hate', as well as l'amore odia 'love hates', although sequences containing verbs were quite uncommon. however, the search for lemma verbs retrieved also a number of participial forms used as adjectives (as in amore odiato 'hated love', where odiato is the past participle of odiare 'to hate'). second, we added contrastive adjective ~ adverb pairs connected to the nouns in in addition, to enrich data retrieval, we selected lexemes semantically related to the members of the antonymous pairs in the final phase of the analysis implied the interrogation of the sketch engine word sketch tool, which describes the collocational behavior of words by showing the lexemes that most typically co-occur with them, within specific syntagmatic contexts, by using statistical association measures. in this case, we searched for all nouns participating in the antonymous pairs in ## results the multiple-step procedure described in section 2 resulted in a final list of 376 oxymorons, the first of its kind in italian, to the best of our knowledge. the full dataset (italian oxymorons 1.0) is provided in the appendix and released as an excel file through the university of bologna institutional research repository (amsacta): http://amsacta.unibo.it/id/eprint/6388 around 20% of the oxymorons were found in both corpora, whereas the vast majority (almost 80%) was retrieved in ittenten16, which is much larger than coris (4.9 billion vs. 150 million words). ## a complementary method another complementary technique to harvest oxymorons from corpora is, quite trivially, to search the word ossimoro 'oxymoron'. we noticed that, when they come across or use (what they believe to be) an oxymoron, speakers tend to comment on it metalinguistically, as in: una guerra santa (grandissimo ossimoro) 'a holy war (huge oxymoron)' (from coris). this behavior allows to detect oxymorons which would probably be missed otherwise. to test this method we searched the string [.*ossimor.*] in coris (retrieving 223 hits). upon preliminary manual checking, we found a number of valid oxymorons. a few were already included in our list, like tenebra luminosissima 'very bright shadow' (cf. tenebra luminosa 'bright shadow' in the appendix). another few were examples, related to one of the antonymous pairs we considered (cf. most cases, however, were completely new oxymorons. some could have been ideally identified with our method based on antonymous pairs (e.g. normalmente eccezionali 'normally exceptional', piangendo rido 'i laugh crying', caoticamente ordinate 'chaotically tidy'), but many others turned out to be hardly foreseeable and heavily dependent on context and on the speaker's beliefs and communicative intentions. take for instance: a cala del faro, villaggio superchic di porto cervo, l'ultimo business è un ossimoro applicato al calcio: il ritiro mondano 'in cala del faro, a superchic village at porto cervo, the last business is an oxymoron applied to football: the social training camp', where the writer emphasizes the contradiction in hosting a ritiro 'training camp' (lit. retirement) in such a voguish and social place like porto cervo. or: vi attendono minacciosi decine di ristoranti tibetani, praticamente un ossimoro […] non essendo propriamente gli altopiani tibetani un paradiso dell'enogastronomia '[there] tens of threatening tibetan restaurants are waiting for you, basically an oxymoron […] since tibetan uplands are not exactly the paradise of food and wine', where the writer's bad opinion about tibetan food and wine is ironically expressed. therefore, this method might be especially promising for identifying creative, highly contextual oxymorons. in this respect, social media platforms are definitely one of the sources to be used for this kind of research, which we leave for future studies. ## future challenges this short paper illustrates the results of an investigation aimed at tracking down oxymoronic constructions in corpora of written italian. far from being exhaustive, this is just a preliminary attempt, resulting in an initial list of 376 oxymorons that needs to be enriched. on the one hand, this enrichment may be pursued by adding more antonymous pairs under the current approach, which however heavily relies on manual work at various stages and would benefit from a higher degree of automation. on the other hand, different methods should be devised and tested for the (we suspect) wide set of oxymorons that cannot be traced back to antonymous pairs. for instance, some oxymorons actually contain synonymous or even identical elements, within specific structures, such as suoni senza suono 'sounds without sound' (retrieved from ittenten16). more interestingly, as @xcite observes, "oxymora are frequently found in everyday speech, many of them barely noticed as such, for example, 'intense apathy,' 'internal exile,' 'man child,' 'loyal opposition,' 'plastic glasses,' 'guest host,' and so on. the ubiquity of these figures suggests some underlying ability to conceive of ideas, objects, and events in oxymoronic terms." but -we add -it also suggests that the detection of these tropes is yet another challenge for automatic extraction, especially considering that some are heavily contextual. moreover, many oxymorons are "jocular", as horn (2018) observes, mentioning cases such as military intelligence, congressional ethics, airplane food and open secrets. given this, a deeper investigation of oxymorons looks even more desirable. beside advancing our knowledge of figurative language in general, it would have clear benefits for other mainstream challenges in nlp, like the detection of humor, irony and sarcasm.