A corpus-based study on the functional distribution of different morphostructural antonyms in Chinese

Abstract

There are few corpus-based studies on antonym co-occurrences in Chinese, and disyllabic antonyms in Chinese are still underresearched. Hsu (2015) has found that disyllabic antonyms display more flexibility in working with various constructions, yet how the morphosyllabic structure of an antonym pair may influence its functional distribution needs to be investigated more closely. The present study fills this gap by offering another corpus-based analysis of thirteen antonym pairs in Chinese. It is found that monosyllabic antonyms, compared with their disyllabic counterparts, have more skewed functional distributions because they frequently co-occur in some specific lexico-syntactic frames to adapt to disyllabic prosodic patterns in modern Chinese. However, the effect of morphosyllabic properties is sometimes overridden by that of discourse features. Moreover, the word class and the semantic features of an antonym pair are also found to play a role in the distributional patterns of antonym co-occurrences in Chinese. All these factors interact with each other in a complex way.