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The political (rather than analytic or conceptual) critique of binary oppositions is an important part of third wave feminism, post-colonialism, post-anarchism, and critical race theory, which argue that the perceived binary dichotomy between man/woman, civilized/uncivilised, and white/black have perpetuated and legitimized societal power structures favoring a specific majority.
In lexical semantics, opposites are words lying in an inherently incompatible binary relationship. For example, something that is even entails that it is not odd. It is referred to as a 'binary' relationship because there are two members in a set of opposites. The relationship between opposites is known as opposition.
The sentence "the exact number of marbles in the urn is either 10 or 11" presents two contrary alternatives: the urn could also contain 2 marbles or 17 marbles. A common form of using contraries in false dilemmas is to force a choice between extremes on the agent: someone is either good or bad, rich or poor, normal or abnormal.
Structuralism posits the concept of binary opposition, in which frequently-used pairs of opposite-but-related words (concepts) are often arranged in a hierarchy; for example: Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signified/signifier, symbolic/imaginary, and east/west.
In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant default or minimum-effort form is known as unmarked ; the other, secondary one is marked . In other words, markedness involves the characterization of a "normal" linguistic unit against one or more of its possible "irregular" forms.
This page was last edited on 27 February 2009, at 21:52 (UTC).; Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may apply.
In lexical semantics, opposites are words lying in an inherently incompatible binary relationship. For example, something that is male entails that it is not female. It is referred to as a 'binary' relationship because there are two members in a set of opposites. The relationship between opposites is known as opposition.
For structuralists such as Roman Jakobson grammatical categories were lexemes that were based on binary oppositions of "a single feature of meaning that is equally present in all contexts of use". Another way to define a grammatical category is as a category that expresses meanings from a single conceptual domain, contrasts with other such ...