Monosyllabic Verb Asymmetry Studies

This paper selects verbal antonyms of monosyllable as the research object. Verbal antonyms of monosyllable are investigated in the lexical and syntactic level. The causes of asymmetry in verbal antonyms of monosyllable are analyzed both inside and outside of language. The asymmetric phenomenon of verbal antonyms of monosyllable in the lexical level lies in the following aspects:The first is the asymmetry of word formation ability. The phenomenon of asymmetry exists both in the number of word formation and the usage frequency of compound composed of the same morpheme. The second is the asymmetry of meaning of compound words. The number of asymmetric words is more than that of symmetric words. The paper holds that the reason for the asymmetric phenomenon of verbal antonyms of monosyllable in the lexical level is the influence of morphological collocation rules and the combination of morpheme and meaning. In the lexical level, verbal antonyms of monosyllable is asymmetric due to the influences of syntactic functions, verb-object collocation, verb complement collocation, as well as the impact of sentence pattern. Among them, the sentence pattern is the greatest one.