A Study On Chinese Words Composed Of Two Semantically-Contrary Morphemes And Its Acquisition

There is a sort of words in modern Chinese, composed of two contrary single-syllabled morphemes. For short, it was called antonyms-composed word in the paper. It has research value for its special model and semantic patterns. This study paid great attention on antonyms-composed word's lexical meaning, functional meaning, coloring meaning and morpheme order. And through statistical and analytical research on these antonyms-composed words in The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary The 5^th Edition, we discovered some rules between the special sort of words and their morphemes on the aspects of meanings and forms. Further more, the cultural traits behind the special words were explored in a certain extent, the words with similar forms and meanings were classified and compared. In order to facilitate Chinese language research and teaching, we compared Chinese antonyms-composed word with the English words in pairs on the aspects of number, form and meaning. Moreover, by the means of questionnaire, we investigated some foreigners in the middle phase of learning Chinese in Jinan University to see their recognition, comprehension and expression of antonyms-composed words. Thus the study on antonyms-composed words was initially led to the field of Chinese acquisition. At last, basically depending on the acquisition study, secondarily on studying forms and meanings of the words, some suggestion was put forwards for teaching antonyms-composed words in the class of teaching Chinese as a foreign language.