Complementarity

In its broadest sense, complementarity is a relationship between two sets (or categories, classes) that do not overlap, i.e. they have no element in common. In linguistics, it is used with a variety of more specific meanings:
 * Two linguistic elements are said to be in complementary distribution if they cannot occur in the same type of context.
 * In lexical semantics, complementarity is a sense relation that holds between predicates whose denotations do not overlap, i.e. there is no object to which both predicates can apply.