Are drag and push contraries?

The chapter investigates the phenomenal experience of contrariety in relation to linguistic structures. In this sense it intersects a series of common questions concerning where contrariety lies in language (beyond the familiar case of adjectives), what the degree of evidence of contrariety manifested in different linguistic structures is, whether there is a relationship linking perceptual structures of contrariety and their “traces” in semantic meaning, and what differences in the structures of contrariety emerge when people are asked to recognize if two sentences or words express contrariety or not as opposed to asking them to produce contrary linguistic stimuli. The studies offer reassuring results in that they show the heuristic value of extending the study of contrariety in language beyond the classic domain of antonymous adjectives or prepositions. The empirical studied presented reveal the importance of perceptual (spatial) structures in verbs with opposite meanings.