What makes an awfully good oxymoron?

Abstract Oxymorons combine two opposite terms in a paradoxical manner. They are closely intertwined with antonymy, since the union of antonymous items creates the paradoxical effect of the oxymoron and generates a new meaning. Compared to other forms of figurative language, oxymorons are largely underinvestigated. We explored what makes good oxymorons through a crowdsourcing task in which we asked participants to judge the acceptability, comprehensibility, effectiveness/aptness, commonness, pleasantness, and humoristic connotation of Italian adjective–noun oxymorons. We hypothesized that oxymorons featuring morphologically related antonyms ( felice infelicità ‘happy unhappiness’) may be perceived to be better than oxymorons featuring morphologically unrelated antonyms ( felice tristezza ‘happy sadness’) and that oxymorons constructed by complementaries ( esatta inesattezza ‘exact inexactness’) may be perceived to be better than oxymorons constructed by contraries ( bella bruttezza ‘beautiful ugliness’). The results confirmed only partially our hypotheses: oxymorons with complementaries were perceived as more acceptable, comprehensible, effective/apt, common, whereas no strong trend was found for the other two dimensions. Surprisingly, our analyses revealed that oxymoronic constructions containing morphologically unrelated words were perceived as more acceptable, comprehensible, effective/apt, common, pleasant, contradicting our initial expectations.