A Corpus-Based Study Of Chinese EFL Learners' Use Of Antonym Co-Occurrence

Antonymy is one of the most concerned semantic phenomena as a typical one of semantic relations. The studies of antonymy in the past focus on four aspects including definition, classification, features and functions. In recent years, antonym co-occurrence is becoming a pretty popular topic gradually. Antonym co-occurrence takes antonymy a change from conventional paradigmatic axis to syntagmatic axis, which has expanded and richens antonymy research. At present, the studies of antonym co-occurrence home and abroad consist of five aspects: antonym co-occurrence 's frequency, syntactic structure and discourse functions, non-conventional antonyms, pattern of sequence and the cross-language research, syntactic structure and discourse functions(totally eight classes: coordinated antonymy, ancillary antonymy, comparative antonymy, distinguished antonymy, transitional antonymy, negated antonymy, extreme antonymy, idiomatic antonymy) of which is the hot spot and focus of antonym co-occurrence. However, as a common phenomenon in practical language use, antonym co-occurrence use of L2 leaners is barely explored. That is unbeneficial to the complete realization of L2 learners' language development, especially their discourse competence. Therefore, the present study aims to study Chinese EFL learners' use of antonym co-occurrence on the basis of existing researches on antonym co-occurrence. The author is eager to have a general recognition of Chinese's usage of antonym co-occurrence and gives some advice to the learning and teaching of AC.This thesis makes a superficial exploration on the situation of antonym co-occurrence usage of Chinese EFL learners based on the corpus SWECCL 2.0 from Wen Qiufang(2008). The goal is to find usage features and the distribution of discourse functions of antonym co-occurrence of Chinese EFL learners. Finally, the thesis tries to discuss the distance of antonym co-occurrence usage between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers and explain the reason behind the distance.The result shows that there exist similarities and differences of the antonym co-occurrence usage between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers. Firstly, Chinese learners are inferior to native speakers on the frequency of antonymy co-occurrence and antonym numbers. Secondly, according to existed research, even if the English antonym co-occurrence use of native speakers in written language is different from that in spoken language, the gap or distance is tiny. However, for Chinese learners, the gap is bigger. Lastly, Chinese learners tend to use coordinated antonymy, and ancillary is in turn. The least six minor antonymy classes are used infrequently. As a result, Chinese EFL learners are different from native speakers on distribution of antonym co-occurrence discourse functions. However, such situation fails to take place that the proportions of eight discourse functions of antonym co-occurrence usage of Chinese leaners haven't become closer to that of native speakers with the increasing of learners' proficiencies. The reasons behind that can be attributed to something like learners' primary age of L2 learning and cultural background.