| The opposite compounds in modern Chinese are a group of paratactic compounds, each of which consists of two monosyllabic morphemes opposite in meaning, the number of which is greatly limited for its unique way of construction. However, they carry a big weight in the whole Chinese lexical system and are being used frequently both in colloquial and formal style of language. Due to its small proportion compared with other language constructions, it was not until 1980s that scholars or researchers started to focus their studies on this special lexical phenomenon, but most of them took the methodology of philological description from the perspectives of delimitation, semantic features, historical reasons for generation and rhetoric functions, neglecting their meaning construction and mental processes in understanding. Later, some scholarly tried to apply cognitive perspectives to the generation of opposite compounds, their interpretations were not comprehensive or systematic enough; neither did they have reliable statistics to support their studies.The present study integrates the Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) with figure/ground segregation, metaphor, metonymy and sequence iconicity with a result of a new framework of CBT+ to exhaustively analyze 255 opposite compounds selected from Modern Chinese Dictionary. The analysis is conducted from both meaning construction and word order formation of opposite compounds.This thesis includes five chapters, and the main contents are described briefly as follows.Chapter one serves as the general introduction to the study including the motivation, purpose, methodology and data collection as well as the layout.Chapter two reviews the previous studies on Chinese opposite compounds. The pages mainly go to the summarizing and commenting of the previous achievements of Chinese opposite compounds, based on which the gap between the previous studies and the present is exposed.Chapter three makes several amendments to CBT and proposes a new framework of CBT+ which is employed as the theoretical basis of the thesis. In chapter four, a detailed description is first made for the corpus of the present study. Then the data will be analyzed under the framework of CBT+ put forward in chapter three with an attempt to explore the generation mechanisms of the Chinese opposite compounds.Chapter five comes to the conclusion in which four contributions are listed:Firstly, CBT+ is proposed based on CBT with integration of figure/ground segregation, metaphor, metonymy and principle of sequence iconicity. Secondly, the author has conducted an exhaustive analysis of opposite compounds from the fifth edition of Modern Chinese Dictionary. Meanwhile, the analysis is the first time to be supported with statistics.Thirdly, based on the data analysis, two characteristics of meaning generation are found:1) The meaning generation undergoes a conceptual blending process which is clearly along with a scale from easy to difficult as well as a increasing proportion: compositional, biased, and blended.2) The cognitive mechanisms of figure/ground, metaphor and metonymy play very crucial roles in the meaning generation, especially the metonymy.Fourthly, the analysis of word orders can be a proof of the sequence iconicity existing in Chinese opposite compounds.Meanwhile, chapter five also includes the limitations of the present study and suggestions for future research.
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