Co-occurrence Of Antonyms:A Construction Grammar Approach

Antonyms is one sort of semantic relations where two opposite words occurring in the same lexical structure.With regard to the research on this language phenomenon,studies have attempted to illustrate its syntactic features,semantic definitions,and discourse functions.This thesis explores English constructions in which antonymous pairs co-occur from the perspective of Construction Grammar.The patterns in which antonyms co-occur can be seen as constructions since it is often the case that two unrelated words can be used together in the constructions to show opposite meanings.Now that those words have nothing in common,let alone being opposite,constructions themselves may have the meaning of oppositeness.Also,as for the fact that coordinated antonyms can show inclusiveness and exhaustiveness,an interpretation is provided that it is concerned with the conceptual distance between those two antonym pairs.In other words,if two antonym pairs stand closely without anything in between,they convey just two opposite states.However,if they are laid in the construction,that is to say,there is something between them,they show more than being two states but the whole scale.In addition,the motivation behind ancillary antonyms is also explored using Haiman's maximized motivation principle.