A Cognitive Interpretation Of The Common Form Of Chinese And English Antonyms

An antonym is a word having a meaning opposite to that of another word. Each word in the pair is the antithesis of the other. Antonymy is the sense relation that exists between words which are opposite in meaning and one of the fundamental lexical-semantic relations. Antonym co-occurrence means a pair of words with opposite meanings existing in a concrete linguistic unit, which can be a word, a phrase or even a sentence according to the research scale. As a very important semantic relation which is often used in the practice of language, antonymy is also a reflection of objective things in the human brain, therefore the thinking on antonymy is always a close part of knowledge and human life. In previous studies of antonym co-occurrence, main achievements focus on the descriptive analysis, such as frequency of antonym co-occurrence and discourse functions, etc. The interpretation of antonym co-occurrence has not been studied. Antonym co-occurrence normally generates an expanded meaning which cannot strictly be computed from its components. This thesis employs a construction grammar approach to study the linguistic pattern and interpret the meaning shift. Antonym co-occurrence is an independent construction, in addition, metaphor and metonymy are two cognitive mechanisms to expound meaning shift of antonym co-occurrence.