Abstract

Antonymous Adjectives in Disyllabic Lexical Compounds in Mandarin: A Cognitive Linguistics Perspective

Highlights

  • Antonymy is traditionally regarded as a paradigmatic relation

  • This study is a cognitive account of Mandarin disyllabic compound constructions composed of two antonymous adjective roots, such as 长短 chang duan, literally long-short, ‘length’, 左右 zuo you, literally left-right, ‘control’, and 反 正 fan zheng, literally back-face, ‘anyway’

  • The perspective of cognitive grammar being taken, this paper proposes that the component adjectives have their own characteristics which provide part of predictability for their co-occurrence in constructions

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Summary

Introduction

Antonymy is traditionally regarded as a paradigmatic relation. the members of a antonym pair present relatively higher co-occurrence tendency than synonyms and hyponyms (e.g. Justeson & Katz [17]; Mettinger [22]; Fellbaum [8]; Willners [36]). Justeson and Katz [17] extended Charles and Miller’s study They argued that the co-occurrence takes place by substitution which yields the antonym alignment, and the alignment makes the association possible. Literature review shows that antonymous adjectives in discontinuous constructions have been focused on a lot, but little research concerns their co-occurrence in lexical compounds. This study is a cognitive account of Mandarin disyllabic compound constructions composed of two antonymous adjective roots, such as 长短 chang duan, literally long-short, ‘length’, 左右 zuo you, literally left-right, ‘control’, and 反 正 fan zheng, literally back-face, ‘anyway’. The perspective of cognitive grammar being taken, this paper proposes that the component adjectives have their own characteristics which provide part of predictability for their co-occurrence in constructions.

Why Choose the Perspective of Cognitive Grammar?
Grammatical Categories from the View of Cognitive Grammar
Constructions from the View of Cognitive Grammar
Data Extraction
The General Characteristics of the Phenomenon
Semantic Properties of Component Adjectives
State Instead of Quality
Gradability and Scale
Concrete Properties and Evaluative Properties
Ordering of Adjectives in Compounds
Semantics and Grammatical Categories of Compounds
Cognitive Explanation
Semantic Type I—Conjunction
Semantic Type II --Generalization
Semantic Type III— ‘In Any Case’
Semantic Type IV— ‘Control’
The network
Findings
Further Discussion
Conclusions

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