A contrast set is a bounded collection of items, each of which could fill the same slot in a given

schema Schema may refer to: Science and technology * SCHEMA (bioinformatics), an algorithm used in protein engineering * Schema (genetic algorithms), a set of programs or bit strings that have some genotypic similarity * Schema.org, a web markup vocab ...

, syntactic structure, or other linguistic environment. The seven days of the week, the fifty United States, the eight Hawaiian islands, the letters in the alphabet, the categories "male" and "female," the students in a class, or the flavors on offer at an ice cream store are all examples of contrast sets. Contrast sets may be relatively natural in origin (such as the eight Hawaiian islands) or relatively conventional (such as the fifty United States). The mastery of certain conventional contrast sets is essential to basic socialization: for example, calendrical units,

musical notes In music, notes are distinct and isolatable sounds that act as the most basic building blocks for nearly all of music. This discretization facilitates performance, comprehension, and analysis. Notes may be visually communicated by writing them in ...

, and elements of writing systems like

numerals A numeral is a figure (symbol), word, or group of figures (symbols) or words denoting a number. It may refer to: * Numeral system used in mathematics * Numeral (linguistics), a part of speech denoting numbers (e.g. ''one'' and ''first'' in English ...

and the

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

. These contrast sets frequently become the subject of

synesthesia Synesthesia (American English) or synaesthesia (British English) is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People with sy ...

s or ideasthesias.

Semantic relations Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction between sense and referenc ...

that form or represent contrast sets include cohyponymy (for example, major categories of trees include pine, elm, willow, maple, and so on) and comeronymy (for example, major components of a motor vehicle include an engine or motor, a transmission, one or more batteries, a set of wheels and tires, and so on). Linguistic anthropologists

Harold Conklin Harold Colyer Conklin (April 27, 1926 – February 18, 2016) was an American Anthropology, anthropologist who conducted extensive ethnoecology, ethnoecological and Linguistics, linguistic field research in Southeast Asia (particularly the Philip ...

and Charles Frake were the first to work out the concept of the contrast set in the 1950s, and the concept was described in detail in Frake's article "The ethnographic study of cognitive systems."

Knowledge representation and reasoning Knowledge representation (KR) aims to model information in a structured manner to formally represent it as knowledge in knowledge-based systems whereas knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, or KR²) also aims to understand, reason, and ...

aims to allow

information technology Information technology (IT) is a set of related fields within information and communications technology (ICT), that encompass computer systems, software, programming languages, data processing, data and information processing, and storage. Inf ...

to recognize and make use of the meaning and interrelationships of contrast sets. For example,

ontology components Contemporary Ontology (information science), ontologies share many structural similarities, regardless of the ontology language in which they are expressed. Most ontologies describe individuals (instances), classes (concepts), attributes, and rel ...

for

ontologies In information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definitions of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, or entities that pertain to one, many, or all domains of discourse. More ...

, as well as

graph database A graph database (GDB) is a database that uses graph structures for semantic queries with nodes, edges, and properties to represent and store data. A key concept of the system is the graph (or edge or relationship). The graph relates the dat ...

s, are tools to help with that goal.

References

Anthropology Linguistics Structuralism {{Anthropology-stub