SIMILAR, AND SIMILAR CONCEPTS

This paper analyzes English symmetrical predicates such as collide and march. Its point of departure is an analysis of the concept 'similar' from Tversky (1977) that appears to show that similarity is psycholog ically asymmetrical. One basis for this claim from Tversky is that the sentences North Korea is similar to Red China and Red China is simila r to North Korea are assessed as differing in meaning by experimental subjects; this seems to imply that the symmetrical entailment (R x, y <-> R y, x) fails for this concept. Five experiments are presented tha t show: (1) the apparent asymmetry of similar is reproduced for 20 pre dicates that are intuitively thought to be symmetrical, including equa l and identical; (2) unique linguistic-interpretative properties hold for these symmetrical words, such as reciprocal interpretation when th ey appear intransitively, for example, North Korea and Red China are s imilar; (3) the asymmetrical interpretation of subject-complement cons tructions containing the symmetrical words is a consequence of general Linguistic-interpretive principles. On the basis of the experimental findings, we offer an analysis of symmetrical predication. One major c laim of the analysis is that symmetry is a property of lexical items a nd has no special syntax, that is, that John meets is semantically but not syntactically anomalous. A second claim is that the structural po sitioning of noun phrases in sentences containing symmetricals-rather than inherent semantic properties of the noun phrases themselves-sets their status as Figure and Ground (as described by Talmy, 1985) or Var iant and Referent (as described by Tversky, 1977) in the comparison, e ven if the nouns are nonsense items. Finally, the behavior of symmetri cal predicates is shown to vary as a function of their differing lexic al class assignments and collateral semantic designations, such as act ivity versus state. Most generally, it is claimed that a deeper unders tanding of symmetrical terms comes from analyzing the semantics of syn tactic structures in which they appear.