Asymmetries. Compound Directional Verb In Reverse Word Study

As a special and closed category, Compound directional verbs have significant characteristics, such as the flexible syntactic structures, the complex meanings, and the regular forms. According to the way they gain their semanteme of [+direction], the opposite words of compound directional verbs can be divided into two groups: the objective opposite direction verbs and the subjective opposite direction verbs. On the basis of statistics and analysis for nearly two million words, we found out that these two kinds of compound directional verbs have significant asymmetric phenomena in the aspects of their meanings and frequency. In this paper we firstly describe these asymmetric phenomena in detail, and then try to explain them, conclude some universal principles finally.This paper includes three parts: the introduction, the main part, and the conclusion.The first chapter is the introduction. It mainly expounds the background of the research, the reason we selected this tropic as well as the illustration of corpora used in this paper.The main part includes the second to the fourth chapter. The second chapter firstly redefines some conceptions such as compound directional verbs, opposite directional words, symmetry and asymmetry etc. which involved in this paper, then find out the objective opposite direction verbs and the subjective opposite direction verbs in the first time. In the third chapter on the basis of the specific example sentences and data, we describe the asymmetric phenomena in the meanings and frequency and try to use this asymmetry on guiding our practices such as teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Relying on the previous research, the fourth chapter mainly explains the asymmetries from the cognitive perspective. We summarize some universal principles, hoping to deepen our understanding of the compound directional verbs. The final part of the paper is a conclusion. After summing up the whole paper, we point out the disadvantages of our research and our direction in the future.