A Cognitive Study On Inserted Strings Of Co-occurring Spatial Antonyms In Chinese

The contrast between opposites in meaning usually reflects the contrast of objective world. Using antonyms can brightly indicate the opposite aspects of two conflicting things and create striking contrast. In daily life people tend to take two sides of contradiction into consideration, to get integrated generalization. Thus, researches on antonyms in English and Chinese are of great significance for not only understanding word meanings accurately and profoundly, but also enhancing rhetorical and cultural learning. There are many linguists and scholars who carry out researches on English antonyms and antonym co-occurrence in English, however, the patterns of antonym co-occurrence do not fit for relevant study on Chinese due to its characteristic of parataxis. Spatial words take important role in human's experiences and cognition and space is the basic cognitive domain, because of which, this research chose eight pairs of spatial antonyms as our main objects and collected four-character Chinese phrases containing spatial antonyms.Employing eight pairs of Chinese antonyms, this dissertation carried out a research on the categorization and features of inserted strings in four-character phrases in Chinese, as an attempt to explore and illustrate the formative mechanism of this language phenomenon from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. On the basis of previous studies, this dissertation defined the inserted strings through vivid examples for the first time. Besides compound words, almost all phrases with Chinese antonym pairs have the expanded form A + X + B + !X or X + A + !X + B, where !X denotes the opposite of X, while A and B are the interpolated elements(named inserted strings) having the same character length. The same character length in this study is confined to one Chinese character, making the phrase a four-character phrase including the inserted strings. The probe into the internal relationship between inserted strings would be beneficial to the further study on Chinese words and phrases and also lay a research foundation for it. This dissertation, therefore, categorized the data retrieved from CCL corpus and further analyzed their features according to the semantic relation between inserted strings. Furthermore, the study in this dissertation would be able to provide clues for the formation of phrases in Chinese, and it could also to certain extent, produce influences on Chinese teaching for foreigners.Using the principles of iconicity, (sequence iconicity, quantity iconicity, and symmetry iconicity), the theory of meme, economy principle, etc, this dissertation clarified the structure of four-character phrases and their internal relationship, analyzed and explained how they came into being in society by means of meme and economy principle in cognitive linguistics. In addition, through analysis of phrases collected from CCL, it could be seen that people would substitute the inserted strings based on their cognitive experiences and conversation demands, provided that they occur in thefour-character structure composed of antonym pairs.On the whole, this dissertation contains five chapters:The first chapter provides an overall introduction of this study, which clarifies the related concepts, research motivations, goals, its significance and main contents of each chapter.Chapter Two is a simple review of current studies on antonyms and antonym co-occurrence. The main language structures, which cover antonym co-occurrence in Chinese, are particularly discussed and the concept of inserted strings is explicitly defined in this chapter.Chapter Three covers the accurate classification of all phrases in this study, using formula to express the relation between inserted strings. Examples are listed to assist explaining the features owned by each category.In Chapter Four, the cognitive theories of iconicity and meme are employed to explain the restrictive mechanism of internal sequence between inserted strings, and explore the cognitive motivation of the formation of the four-character phrases that contains antonyms pairs.Chapter Five is a brief summary of the whole study, including the conclusion, the existing limitations and the research development in the future.