ABSTRACT
One of the most deductive statements ever made about contrasts between town and country is to be found in the course of C.K. Ogden's (1932) linguistic and psychological analysis of opposition. He recognized three types: opposition separated by a cut (such as right/left); by a scale (such as top/bottom), where there is a continuous scale from one pole to another, its opposite; and by definition (see his diagram, p. 16). For an example of the last type, Ogden took the pair of town/country. His amplification is deductive as far as urban geography is concerned because he was interested in town and country only to the extent that they were exemplary opposites; yet it is remarkable how his argument penetrates to their essence.
Town and Country. If this is taken as a typical case of opposition by definition (based on statistical density of population, houses, etc.), the value of the opposition in practical application is relative to the growth of suburbs. In due course the distinction might vanish altogether throughout the entire surface of an urbanized planet. An opposition originally created by definition (in response to factual requirements on the basis of a cut) is thus shifting to a scale whose extremes are being gradually obliterated by the expansion of its middle (suburban) range. A temporary stage is thus reached where semantic complications are produced by legal definitions in terms of difference rather than opposition. Finally, in such cases, the oppositional definition may retain historical significance only. (p. 78)
