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This book studies Chinese opposites. It uses a large corpus (GigaWord) to trace the behavior of opposite pairings' co-occurrence, focusing on the following questions: In what types of constructions, from window-size restricted and bi-syllabic to quad-syllabic, will the opposite pairings appear together? And, on a larger scale, i.e. in constrained-free contexts, in which syntactic frames will the opposite pairings appear together? The data suggests aspects that have been ignored by previous theoretical studies, such as the ordering rules in co-occurrent pairings, the differences between the three main sub-types of opposites (that is, antonym, complementary, converse) in discourse function distributions. The author also considers the features of this Chinese study and compares it to similar studies of English and Japanese. In all, it offers a practical view of how opposites are used in a certain language as a response to the puzzles lingering in theoretical fields.
This study appeals to linguists, computational linguists and language-lovers. With numerous tables, illustrations and examples, it is easy to read but also encourages readers to link their personal instincts with the results from a large corpus to experience the beauty of language as a shared human resource.
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 1.1 Motivations.- 1.2 Research Questions.- 1.3 Organization of Chapters.- 2. Literature Review.- 2.1 Definition and Categorization.- 2.2 Some Properties of Being Opposites.- 3. Opposites in Constructions.- 3.1 Research Question.- 3.2 Methodology, Candidate List and Corpus.- 3. 3 Results.- 3. 4 Discussion.- 3.5 Summary.- 4. Opposites in Discourse.- 4.1 Research Question and Previous Experiments.- 4.2 Methodology, Candidate List and Corpus.- 4.3 Result.- 4.4 Discussion.- 4.5 Summary.- 5. Opposites and Negation.- 5.1 Research Question.- 5.2 Methodology, Candidate List and Corpus.- 5.3 Result.- 5.4 Discussion.- 5.5 Summary.- 6. Conclusion.
About the author
Dr. Jing Ding is presently a research fellow at the School of International Education, South China University of Technology. She received her PhD from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, in 2015. Her main research interests are lexical semantics and computational linguistics. She has published papers in the Proceedings of the Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop.
Summary
This book studies Chinese opposites. It uses a large corpus (GigaWord) to trace the behavior of opposite pairings’ co-occurrence, focusing on the following questions: In what types of constructions, from window-size restricted and bi-syllabic to quad-syllabic, will the opposite pairings appear together? And, on a larger scale, i.e. in constrained-free contexts, in which syntactic frames will the opposite pairings appear together? The data suggests aspects that have been ignored by previous theoretical studies, such as the ordering rules in co-occurrent pairings, the differences between the three main sub-types of opposites (that is, antonym, complementary, converse) in discourse function distributions. The author also considers the features of this Chinese study and compares it to similar studies of English and Japanese. In all, it offers a practical view of how opposites are used in a certain language as a response to the puzzles lingering in theoretical fields.
This study appeals to linguists, computational linguists and language-lovers. With numerous tables, illustrations and examples, it is easy to read but also encourages readers to link their personal instincts with the results from a large corpus to experience the beauty of language as a shared human resource.
