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Old September 28, 2010, 01:24 PM
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Tarential Tarential is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Canada
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Not all opposites are complementaries (ie hot vs cold, good vs bad). That is only one type of opposite. For example, a "parent" vs a "child" are not complementaries, but they are a type of opposite. So even if it's not as straightforward as "tall" vs "short", the word "sweet" still does have an opposite. It might, in fact, have multiple opposites as I pointed out in a previous post (example: "stationary" vs "moving" "speeding" "flying" or a number of other words).

To add to what I said before, antonyms are gradable opposites; I'm still not 100% certain whether sweet to sour is gradable (I'm sure there are ways to measure how sweet or sour something is, I just don't know them), which is why I said I'm not sure if it was an antonym or not. It is, however, an opposite, and either way my statement regarding antonyms stands: All antonyms are opposites, but not all opposites are antonyms.
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