A Cognitive Study Of Antonymous Compounds In Modern Chinese

Antonymous compounds are a group of paratactic compounds which consist of two monosyllabic morphemes with opposite meaning.Plenty of previous studies are made on Chinese antonymous compounds from perspectives of grammatical structure,semantic structure and lexical teaching,which provide a solid foundation for this study of Chinese antonymous compounds from a cognitive perspective.However,previous studies ignore the impact of metaphtonymy,so there is limited researches on the semantic cognitive mechanisms for Chinese antonymous compounds.Moreover,previous studies don’t pay much attention to the semantic construction modes and the cognitive motivations of Chinese antonymous compounds.In view of this situation,this study,based on 217 Chinese antonymous compounds collected from Modern Chinese Dictionary(7~thh Ed.),addresses three questions:1)How can Chinese antonymous compounds be classified and what are their linguistic features?2)What are the semantic cognitive mechanisms and meaning construction modes of Chinese antonymous compounds?3)What are the cognitive motivations for the generation of Chinese antonymous compounds?This study makes a classification of Chinese antonymous compounds and generalizes their linguistic features,and based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory,Conceptual Metonymy Theory,Conceptual Blending Theory and Metaphtonymy,this study explores the semantic cognitive mechanisms of Chinese antonymous compounds and their meaning construction modes,and examines both externally and internally the cognitive motivations for the generation of Chinese antonymous compounds.The major findings of this study are as follows:1)Chinese antonymous compounds can be divided into two types,namely antonymous compounds with single sense and antonymous compounds with multiple senses.Chinese antonymous compounds demonstrate distinct linguistic features of stable structure,meaning deriving from the schema image and a tendency of nominalization;2)The semantic cognitive mechanisms of Chinese antonymous compounds include conceptual metaphor,conceptual metonymy,conceptual blending and metaphtonymy.The most important semantic cognitive mechanism of Chinese antonymous compounds with single sense is conceptual blending.Conceptual metonymy is the most important semantic cognitive mechanism for Chinese antonymous compounds with multiple senses.The semantic construction mode of single-sense antonymous compound is linear mode.The semantic construction modes of multiple-sense antonymous compound include of radial mode,tandem mode and tree mode;3)Cognitive motivations of Chinese antonymous compounds involve motivation of bodily experience,motivation of culture,motivation of ways of thinking,motivation of lexical gap,motivation of language economy,and motivation of proximity.This study enhances the understanding of semantic cognitive mechanisms,meaning construction modes and cognitive motivations of Chinese antonymous compounds.It also contributes to the teaching and learning of Chinese antonymous compounds.