A Construction Grammar Approach To The Co-occurrence Of Antonyms In The Chinese Language

Antonymy is a very important semantic relation in language. And antonyms are words which are opposite in meaning, which means they are related by antonymy. In previous studies of Chinese antonyms, scholars have made many achievements on the study of the definitive standard of antonyms or from the angles of semantics, rhetoric, etc. This paper is a study of the co-occurrence of antonyms in the Chinese language from the perspective of Construction Grammar.In the Chinese language, there are a lot of compound antonym words consisting of two elements with opposing or contradicting meaning. This is a complex and interesting phenomenon in language for that these two elements are contradictious in logical relation, but they can co-occur in a word expressing various kinds of meaning in natural language. Actually the co-occurrence of antonyms is not only found in compound antonym words but also in phrase structures and idioms. We observe that Chinese antonyms tend to co-occur in three structures: the compound antonym words, particular phrase structures and the idioms. Then, why do the Chinese antonyms co-occur so frequently in the Chinese language? And why are there only some particular phrase structures can be associated with Chinese antonyms so closely?The relationship of antonyms has always been considered as contrasting based on their meanings on the semantic level. While under the framework of Construction Grammar, Chinese antonyms are also related on the lexical level. The antonymous pair constitutes an antonym construction themselves which makes the antonyms co-occur so frequently.This paper consists of three chapters. The first chapter concludes the three structures antonyms tend to co-occur in the Chinese language, and the motivations of antonym co-occurrence are explored from the philosophical, word formation, and aesthetic perspectives. The second chapter studies why the antonymous pair has a status of construction after the introduction of Construction Grammar. The third chapter analyzes the form and meaning of antonym construction as a construction, and the form and meaning of other three constructions related to Chinese antonyms.This thesis argues that (1) the Chinese antonymous pair especially the direct antonymous pair is a construction—a continuous or discontinuous antonym construction. The form of the construction is the lexical item, with its daughters being continuous or discontinuous; and the meaning/function of Chinese antonym construction is that the daughters of it are incompatible semantically and contrast pragmatically. (2) The Chinese antonymous pair is stored as a well-established lexical item in the mental lexicon dictionary after its usage with sufficient frequency, not necessarily resorting to the meaning comparison of the elements of it. As a lexical item, as a construction, one of the members of an antonymous pair can elicit the other one naturally and frequently. (3) Being contrastive construction, the particular phrase structure has the requirement for the pair of words with contrasting or opposing meanings, which makes the contrastive construction and antonymous pair associated so closely in the Chinese language.This paper probes into the co-occurrence of antonyms in Chinese from the perspective of Construction Grammar, which accounts for the phenomenon and proposes a new perspective and a new method for the study of Chinese antonyms.