A Lexical Semantic Study of Chinese Opposites

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Jing Ding

   Pages 1-2

3. Literature Review

   • Jing Ding

   Pages 3-8

4. Opposites in Constructions

   • Jing Ding

   Pages 9-49

5. Opposites in Discourse

   • Jing Ding

   Pages 51-92

6. Opposites and Negation

   • Jing Ding

   Pages 93-117

7. Conclusion

   • Jing Ding

   Pages 119-121

8. Back Matter

   Pages 123-135

   PDF

This book studies Chinese opposites. It uses a large corpus (GigaWord) to trace the behavior of opposite pairings’ co-occurrence, focusing on the following questions: In what types of constructions, from window-size restricted and bi-syllabic to quad-syllabic, will the opposite pairings appear together? And, on a larger scale, i.e. in constrained-free contexts, in which syntactic frames will the opposite pairings appear together? The data suggests aspects that have been ignored by previous theoretical studies, such as the ordering rules in co-occurrent pairings, the differences between the three main sub-types of opposites (that is, antonym, complementary, converse) in discourse function distributions. The author also considers the features of this Chinese study and compares it to similar studies of English and Japanese. In all, it offers a practical view of how opposites are used in a certain language as a response to the puzzles lingering in theoretical fields.
This study appeals to linguists, computational linguists and language-lovers. With numerous tables, illustrations and examples, it is easy to read but also encourages readers to link their personal instincts with the results from a large corpus to experience the beauty of language as a shared human resource. 

• Chinese Language
• Lexical Semantics
• Computational Linguistics
• GigaWord
• Syntactic Frames
• Discourse Function
• Corpus-based

• School of International Education, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China

  Jing Ding

Dr. Jing Ding is presently a research fellow at the School of International Education, South China University of Technology. She received her PhD from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, in 2015. Her main research interests are lexical semantics and computational linguistics. She has published papers in the Proceedings of the Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop.

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