A Study Of Metaphorical And Metonymic Characteristics In The Semantic Structure Of Chinese Compound Antonym Words

Chinese Compound Antonym Words are made of pairs of monosyllable antonym words, and they have new meanings after lexicalization. So far, the use of Compound Antonym Words in Chinese has become more and more common. However, research on Compound Antonym Words is inadequate. Based on cognitive linguistics, this paper tries to explain the meaning shift of Compound Antonym Words in terms of metaphorical and metonymic characteristics.Up to now, term and definition of Compound Antonym Words are uncertain. This paper uses two principles to select them. First, meanings of the two morphemes in a compound word are opposite. Second, the compound word should have new meanings. According to these two principles, this paper selected 91 Compound Antonym Words for this study.In the semantic structure of Compound Antonym Words, three types of metaphor conception play an important role in explaining their semantic change. Structural metaphor, orientational metaphor and ontological metaphor can explain the meaning shift of some Compound Antonym Words. This paper also finds that in the semantic structure of some Compound Antonym Words, there are four metonymic characteristics: hyponymy for superordination metonymy, the meaning of one morpheme for the whole word metonymy, action for actor metonymy, upper and lower end of a scale for the whole scale metonymy. The meaning shift in Compound Antonym Words contains both metaphorical and metonymic characteristics.