A Lexical Semantic Study of Chinese Opposites

ISBN-13: 9789811348204 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 135 str.

Jing Ding

Spis treści

List of Figures page vii

List of Tables viii

1. Introduction 1

1.1 Motivations 1

1.2 Research Questions 1

1.3 Organization of Chapters 2

2. Literature Review 3

2.1 Definition and Categorization 3

2.2 Some Properties of Being Opposites 5

3. Opposites in Constructions 10

3.1 Research Question 10

3.2 Methodology, Candidate List and Corpus 10

3. 3 Results 11

3. 4 Discussion 35

3.5 Summary 60

4. Opposites in Discourse 61

4.1 Research Question and Previous Experiments 61

4.2 Methodology, Candidate List and Corpus 66

4.3 Result 82

4.4 Discussion 96

4.5 Summary 109

5. Opposites and Negation 111

5.1 Research Question 111

5.2 Methodology, Candidate List and Corpus 111

5.3 Result 114

5.4 Discussion 121

5.5 Summary 138

6. Conclusion 1 4 0

Appendices 143

References

O autorze

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.

Blurb

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.