Antonyms of Adjectives in Chinese
신경미 · Journal of Chinese Language and Literature · 2017
This paper includes research on adjective opposites and neutralization of Chinese. There are many adjectives in each language. However, it is commonly observed that certain adjectives are used more frequently than others; hence, the fundamental concepts of opposites and neutralization, and the neutralization of Chinese adjectives have been discussed in this paper. Many people are confused between opposites and antonyms, but they are different in linguistics. As already known, opposites refer to a pair of words that are contrary to each other in their meanings. However, opposites are divided into three different types and antonyms are one of them. In addition, every adjective has its scale and this is the main reason people use supra terms more often than sub terms; accordingly, two features of supra terms have been explained in this paper: salience and calibratability. As mentioned earlier, the phenomenon where the opposite relation disappears is called `neutralization,` which is determined by the common criterion of a pair of antonyms. Another important finding is that neutralization becomes the standard of markedness distinction. The adjectives that can be neutralized are called `unmarked` and those that cannot be neutralized are `marked.` `Marked` and `unmarked` are currently at the center of the research interests in linguistics.