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

schema The word schema comes from the Greek word ('), which means ''shape'', or more generally, ''plan''. The plural is ('). In English, both ''schemas'' and ''schemata'' are used as plural forms. Schema may refer to: Science and technology * SCHEMA ...

, 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, a note is the representation of a musical sound. Notes can represent the pitch and duration of a sound in musical notation. A note can also represent a pitch class. Notes are the building blocks of much written music: discretization ...

, and elements of writing systems like

numerals A numeral is a figure, symbol, or group of figures or symbols 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) * Numerical d ...

and the

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syll ...

. 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 who re ...

s. Linguistic anthropologists

Harold Conklin Harold Colyer Conklin (April 27, 1926 – February 18, 2016) was an American anthropologist who conducted extensive ethnoecological and linguistic field research in Southeast Asia (particularly the Philippines) and was a pioneer of ethnoscienc ...

and

Charles Frake Charles is a masculine given name predominantly found in English and French speaking countries. It is from the French form ''Charles'' of the Proto-Germanic name (in runic alphabet) or ''*karilaz'' (in Latin alphabet), whose meaning was " ...

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." The Google Sets program attempts to generate a list of the members of a contrast set given a few starter members.labs.google.com/sets
In recent years, the term contrast set has been used extensively in the field of data mining.

References

Anthropology Linguistics Structuralism {{Anthropology-stub