Oxymorons combine two opposite terms in a paradoxical manner. They are closely intertwined with antonymy, since the union of antonymous items creates the paradoxical effect of the oxymoron and generates a new meaning. Compared to other forms of figurative language, oxymorons are largely underinvestigated. We explored what makes good oxymorons through a crowdsourcing task in which we asked participants to judge the acceptability, comprehensibility, effectiveness/aptness, commonness, pleasantness, and humoristic connotation of Italian adjective–noun oxymorons. We hypothesized that oxymorons featuring morphologically related antonyms (felice infelicità ‘happy unhappiness’) may be perceived to be better than oxymorons featuring morphologically unrelated antonyms (felice tristezza ‘happy sadness’) and that oxymorons constructed by complementaries (esatta inesattezza ‘exact inexactness’) may be perceived to be better than oxymorons constructed by contraries (bella bruttezza ‘beautiful ugliness’). The results confirmed only partially our hypotheses: oxymorons with complementaries were perceived as more acceptable, comprehensible, effective/apt, common, whereas no strong trend was found for the other two dimensions. Surprisingly, our analyses revealed that oxymoronic constructions containing morphologically unrelated words were perceived as more acceptable, comprehensible, effective/apt, common, pleasant, contradicting our initial expectations.

矛盾修辞法以矛盾的方式组合两个相反的术语。它们与反义词紧密地交织在一起，因为反义词的结合创造了矛盾修饰法的悖论效果并产生了新的含义。与其他形式的比喻语言相比，矛盾修饰法在很大程度上没有得到充分的研究。我们通过一项众包任务探索了什么是好的矛盾修辞，在该任务中，我们要求参与者判断意大利形容词-名词矛盾修辞的可接受性、可理解性、有效性/恰当性、通用性、愉快性和幽默内涵。我们假设，具有形态相关反义词的矛盾修辞法（felice infelicità '快乐不幸福'）可能被认为比具有形态不相关反义词的矛盾修辞法（felice tristezza '快乐悲伤'）以及由互补词构成的矛盾修辞法（esatta inesattezza '完全不精确'）更好可能被认为比相反的矛盾修辞更好（bella bruttezza “美丽的丑陋”）。结果仅部分证实了我们的假设：具有互补性的矛盾修辞被认为更容易接受、更容易理解、更有效/更恰当、更常见，而其他两个维度则没有发现明显的趋势。令人惊讶的是，我们的分析表明，包含形态上不相关的单词的矛盾修辞结构被认为更容易接受、更容易理解、更有效/更恰当、更常见、更令人愉快，这与我们最初的期望相矛盾。