"i" Antonyms And Synonyms

This thesis is intended to study the antonyms and synonyms that are widely used in Tao Te Ching, a philosophy book written by Tao Tzu. Scholars have done little research on the vocabularies, especially on the synonyms in the book because the book does not have too many pages. This thesis makes a particular study of vocabularies used in the book from the perspective of their meanings. Words extracted from Tao Te Ching are related by semantic meanings. The thesis summarizes features of these words and rules for using them in a reverse way.The thesis is divided into four chapters: Chapter I presents how antonyms are extracted from Tao Te Ching and how they are classified, according to which a standard is set for selecting antonyms. In addition, some typical forms of appearance are given for synonyms and several special antonyms are analyzed in detail in this chapter. This chapter also gives a brief introduction to the words that are used in different chapters with contradicted meanings. Besides, it talks about how cognition influences linguistics after some discussions on the origins of universe in Taoism and combines cognition and linguistics together. Chapter II analyzes in particular the antonyms and synonyms extracted from Tao Te Ching. The number of these words is so small that they are classified by semantic meanings only. This chapter describes the three forms of appearance for synonyms, explains what"semantic judgment"method is, and uses this method to analyze the extracted words. Chapter III lays the theoretical foundation for the whole thesis. It does not only apply the philosophies of Tao Te Ching into cognitive linguistics, but also puts forward and explains some theories supporting this thesis. Then a conclusion is got that antonyms and synonyms used in Tao Te Ching have best exemplified the features of cognitive linguistics. Chapter four is the conclusion part which provides a summary of the structure, purpose, and significance of this thesis. This thesis doesn't go much deep into the vocabularies of Tao Te Ching, however, I hope these simple rules about using antonyms and synonyms will be helpful for the study of Tao Te Ching in the future.