69249454-chandler-semiotics

ANALYSING STRUCTURES 91
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(Jakobson 1976). Such oppositions are essential to the generation of
meaning: the meaning of ‘dark’ is relative to the meaning of ‘light’;
‘form’ is inconceivable except in relation to ‘content’. It is an open
question whether our tendency to think in opposites is determined by
the prominence of oppositions in language or whether language
merely reflects a universal human characteristic. The various conventionally
linked terms with which we are familiar within a culture might
more appropriately be described as paired ‘contrasts’, since they are
not always direct ‘opposites’ (although their use often involves polarization).
Distinctions can be made between various types of ‘oppositions’,
perhaps the most important being the following:
• oppositions (logical ‘contradictories’): mutually exclusive
terms (e.g. alive–dead, where ‘not alive’ can only be ‘dead’);
• antonyms (logical ‘contraries’): terms which are comparatively
graded on the same implicit dimension (e.g. good–
bad, where ‘not good’ is not necessarily ‘bad’).
(Barthes 1967b, 162ff.; Leymore 1975,
7; Lyons 1977, 270ff.)
This is basically a distinction between digital and analogue oppositions:
digital differences are ‘either/or’; analogue distinctions are
‘more-or-less’. Analogue oppositions clearly allow for intermediate
positions. Even the apparently categorical ‘black’ and ‘white’ can of
course be reconfigured as shades of grey.
Structuralists emphasize the importance of relations of paradigmatic
opposition. Roman Jakobson declared that:
In an oppositive duality, if one of the terms is given, then the
other, though not present, is evoked in thought. To the idea of
white there is opposed only that of black, to the idea of beauty
that of ugliness, to the idea of large that of small, to the idea
of closed that of open, and so on. Opposites are so intimately
interconnected that the appearance of one of them inevitably
elicits the other.
(Jakobson 1976, 235; cf. 1973, 321)