The Study About The Asymmetry Of Antonym “快”and“慢”

"快"and"慢"is a commom couple of antonym in modern Chinese. There is currently no a special study done about them.Based on the principles of markedness theory and cognitive and linguistics, The thesis, from both Synchronic and diachronic view, will give a description and analysis about their asymmetry in vocabulary, semantic and syntactic aspects.The main contents of this paper consists of the following components:Part I:Introduction. This section focuses on research about related theory, The research status of adjective antonym, the research overview of "快"and"慢", the purpose and significance of the paper, The source of the corpus and the research methods.Part II:A Synchronic description and analysis about"快"and"慢"in vocabulary.The analysis is mainly from the Number of word-formation, the way of word-formation and the frequency of use.we found that "快" number of word-formation is more than "慢".There are four cases about the words formed by "快"and"慢" in terms of form and meaning. There are seldom examples completely symmetrical both in form and meaning. The most of them are asymmetric both in form and meaning. This is also a much obvious reflection of the asymmetry of the two. "快"and the words formed by it are more frequently used than "慢"and the words formed by it. In general," 快"and"慢"is asymmetrically symmetry at the lexical level.Part III:A diachronic description and analysis about the semantic shift of"快"and"慢".This section studied the semantic shift of "快"and"慢".we found that "快"and"慢" form a semantic field to indicate High and low speed,their development is not synchronized.Their semantic demise, Semantic extension range and the color of semantic evolution is all asymmetry.Part IV:the description and analysis at syntactic level.In this section,we studied both "快"and"慢"collocating with nouns,verbs and adverbs of degree, the syntactic features of their reduplicated form"快快" and "慢慢"and the usage features of "快"and"慢"in Comparative sentences. When collocating with nouns and verbs of degree, "快"and"慢"is basically symmetric.But it’s obviously asymmetric when they collocate with verbs. The reduplicated form "慢慢"is more frequently used and has more grammatical function and freer than "快快".the asymmetry in Comparative sentences is mainly reflected in geometric sentence"A+跟/�'�/同/与+B一样+adj".