The Antonym Construction: A Comparison between English and Mandarin

All languages have antonym pairs but may differ in the ways of using them. The use of antonymy in the form of antonym co-occurrence has been examined and compared between English and Mandarin with the conclusion that antonym pairs could co-occur on lexical level in Mandarin but not in English. That might be refuted with the identification of the antonym co-occurrence on lexical level in English like frenemy (friend-enemy) and humblebrag. Therefore, this study identified and collected the items of antonym co-occurrence on lexical level from in-use English and Mandarin to examine and compare within the framework of Construction Grammar. The collected items were curated for antonymy consistency and the status of being lexicalized. The final sample included 105 English and 161 Mandarin antonym constructs. The two collections were examined and compared from the perspectives of form-meaning schema, headedness, syntactic categories, and inheritance links. In addition to the typological differences between English and Mandarin, the observation demonstrates that the antonym constructions in both languages make use of the unity and contrast inherent in antonymy to communicate the meanings more than a binary contrast. Both can be nominalized or adverbialized, have the property of neutralized headedness, and are a complex of multi-inheritance links across lexical and phrasal levels. Construction Grammar proves effective in facilitating this original joint analysis of the English and the Mandarin antonym constructions. Such effectiveness is credited to observing the antonym constructs as a form-meaning pair in use. Construction is thus proposed as a parameter in future contrastive studies. With the universality of the understanding and use of antonymy on lexical level confirmed between English and Mandarin, further research including more languages will be worthwhile in verifying such cognitive and linguistic universal