An Analysis Of The Asymmetry Of "Before" And "Hou"

At the beginning of language formation, influenced by the opposite thinking mode ofapproaches to the world, there appeared the concept of antonym. Locative words, language unitsof space, time and other categories, are the basic category of both cognition and language.Locative words appear in pairs, such as “Shang” and “Xia”,“Li” and “Wai”,“Qian” and “Hou”,and “Zuo” and “You”. This paper focuses on the pair of antonyms:“Qian” and “Hou”. Startingwith the imbalanced frequency of utilization of these two words, this paper tries to summarizethe phenomenon and trend of the imbalance, through comparing and analyzing concrete corpus.Under the guidance of the principle of “three plans”, this paper analyzes the asymmetrical useof “Qian” and “Hou”, giving concrete language use examples in the aspects of meaning,vocabulary, syntax combinations, sentence structure and error analysis. Guided by markednesstheory and theories of cognitive linguistics, comparing corpus and examples of “Qian” and“Hou” as a language unit, this paper concludes the reason, causing the imbalanced use of “Qian”and “Hou”.This paper can be divided into six parts:The first part is introduction, including literature review. On the basis of previous studies,this part clarifies the value and significance of the topic and explains the research methods andsources of corpus.The second part analyzes, based on the lexical meaning of “Qian” and “Hou”, senses of thetwo respectively and compares them, together with the frequency of common meanings, to figureout the cognitive reason of asymmetrical use.The third part analyzes, on the level of lexical structure, the ability of word formation ofthese two words as morphemes and guided by markedness theory, summarizes the cognitivereason of asymmetrical use.The fourth part analyzes, on the level of syntactic combination, asymmetrical performanceof these two words in combination of other language units.The fifth part analyzes, on the level of common sentence structure, asymmetrical use of“Qian” and “Hou” and finds out that the reason of asymmetrical use is caused by different lexicalmeaning influenced by cognition.The sixth part figures out, on the level of foreign Chinese teaching, the asymmetrical use ofthese two words among foreign students, based on HSK corpus. Thanks to these findings, wecould seek more specific teaching methods and strategies for foreign Chinese teaching.Based on every level of comparison, we could find out that many asymmetrical phenomenaexist in the use of “Qian” and “Hou” and this helps us a lot study the reason of asymmetry in locative words using. The aims of this research are as followed: firstly, summarize the regularpattern and reason of the asymmetrical use of these two words; secondly, through the study of“Qian” and “Hou”, supplement the current study of asymmetrical use of locative words; thirdly,analyze and explain the biased error existed in the foreign Chinese teaching of “Qian” and “Hou”to some degree, hoping to bring some practical significance to teach Chinese as foreignlanguage.