Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
The method of sorting is used to compare sets of adjectival contexts. Contexts of directly antonymous adjectives are found to be highly discriminable, both with sentential and phrasal contexts. These results are used to argue that words with different meanings normally appear in discriminably different contexts, and that the cue for learning to associate direct antonyms is not their substitutability, but rather their relatively frequent co-occurrence in the same sentence.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Charles et al. (1989) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 10 related papers. Consider them for comparative context: