An MP Research On Chinese Opposite Compounds

In modern Chinese vocabulary, there is a kind of compounds called the OppositeCompounds, which is a kind of parallel disyllabic compounds that are composed oftwo morphemes with opposite or contrasting meaning, such as ‘大小’(dà xiǎo)(bigand small),‘高低’(gāo dī)(tall and short),‘刀枪’(dāo qiāng)(sword and spear),‘笔墨’(bǐ mò)(pen and ink) and so on. This is a very important method ofword-formation. From the Pre-Qin Dynasty to today, they have been produced all thetime and have been used frequently both in written and in spoken languages. They areunique not only in meaning, but also in form. Scholars, such as Ma Zhen(1980), TanDaren(1989), Lan Yuying(1998), Shu Dingfang and Huangjie(2008), QiHongfei(2010) etc, have studied the Chinese opposite compounds, but they did notmake a fully and specific discussion and classification of them from the perspective ofmetonymy and prominence principle.This thesis tries to integrate the metonymy and prominence principle in cognitivelinguistics to form a new analytical model-MP Model. And with the help of a closedcorpus composed of277opposite compounds exhaustively collected from TheModern Chinese Dictionary(5thed.), The Big Chinese Dictionary and many otherpapers, we will fully explain the reasons for the formation and semantic change of theChinese opposite compounds, and classify them into two types.This thesis consists of five chapters:Chapter One is a general introduction to the study, which includes themotivations, the purpose of the study, data collection and methodology and layout ofthe thesis.Chapter Two gives a general review of the previous studies on the oppositecompounds. Then it discusses the gaps found in the previous studies and finds thestarting point for this thesis.Chapter Three proposes a new MP analytical model by integrating metonymy andprominence in cognitive linguistics to explain the reasons for the formation andsemantic change of the opposite compounds.Chapter Four is based on the data description and gives a detailed analysis of theopposite compounds using the MP analytical model. Chapter Five draws a conclusion and lists the contributions of the thesis:First, this thesis tries to combine metonymy and prominence views in cognitivelinguistics to establish a new MP analytical model.Second, we have colleted277opposite compounds from the Modern ChineseDictionary，the Big Chinese Dictionary and the relevant papers. Based on metonymyand prominence views, we have divided them into2types: the metonymic oppositecompounds and the prominent opposite compounds. There are250metonymicopposite compounds, accounting for90.3%of the total number and27prominentopposite compounds, accounting for9.7%of the total number. It is the dominantposition of the metonymic mechanism in people’s thinking that makes such a bigdifference in number. When analyzing these two opposite compounds, we classify themetonymic opposite compounds into8subtypes and the prominent oppositecompounds into7subtypes. And according to the statistics, the proportion ofmetonymy of actions and metonymy between the whole and the part is much biggerthan the other types. The former accounts for24%of the total number while the latteraccounts for23.6%. We think that there are two reasons:1) the importance of theproductive activities in people’s daily life;2) the quick development of the economyand people’s pursuit of efficiency in communication. In prominent oppositecompounds, the proportion of the ‘bad’ prominent opposite compounds and thespecial prominent opposite compounds is bigger than the other types, accounting for48.1%and14.8%of the total number respectively. We think the reason might be thatpeople’s cognition always has inclination. It mostly inclines to the ‘bad’ and specialthings or the ‘bad’ and special part of the same thing.Finally, the limitations have been pointed out hoping to give some suggestions forthe future studies on this topic.