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Abstract

Abstract

In modern Chinese, the adverb is regarded as an adjective-adjective compound, with morphemes ‘late’ and ‘early’ as extreme poles in a gradable temporality. The formation of as an antonymous compound has not received much attention from a diachronic construction grammar perspective. This study reports on the historical change of as evidence showing the interplay of antonymous compounds and constructionalization in modern Chinese. Based on corpus analysis, I found that the formation of as a lexical construction inherits from previous changes but emerges instantaneously in Pre-Modern Chinese, where its form has been condensed and its meaning has been bleached to indicate subjectivity. Three arguments shed light on the model of constructionalization: (1) constructionalization at the compound level can be associated with three motivations: subjectivity, frequency, and metaphor; and (2) the operation of constructionalization is at work not only at the sentential and phrasal level but also at the morphological level of compound word formation in Chinese; (3) rhetoric as an output of language use plays a part in the development of constructionalization in relation to antonymous compounds.

© Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University
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2022-05-02
2025-04-27

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The constructionalization of antonymous compounds
Concentric 48, 30 (2022); https://doi.org/10.1075/consl.21012.lu
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): antonymous compound chi-zao; constructionalization; frequency; metaphor; subjectivity; 主觀化; 反義複合詞「遲早」; 構式化; 隱喻; 頻率

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