Four-word Idioms Containing Opposites in Mandarin

Four-word Idioms Containing Opposites in Mandarin1 Siaw-Fong Chung, National Chengchi University sfchung@nccu.edu.tw Abstract This study aims to investigate the occurrences of opposites in Mandarin four-word idioms. We used the Revised Ministry of Education Online Dictionary to search for a total of 12 combinations of opposites in four-word idioms based on 32 opposites. These idioms were analyzed in terms of their dictionary definitions, combinations, and internal structure. Based on the definitions and the POS information on the components in the online dictionary, as well as the combinations of opposites, we collected 910 types of idioms. Our analysis used quantitative method to analyze not only idioms but idioms containing opposites, and our study is one of the few studies that have utilized this approach. 1. Introduction There have been multiple studies on Mandarin idioms, but those that have inspected contrasting words in idioms have seldom been carried out in the past. Wang, Wu, Li, Huang, and Hui (2010: 501) [1], one of the few studies that conducted a corpus-based analysis of the co-occurrence of Chinese opposites, proved that little research on the issue of Chinese antonymy has been performed in the past2: “We searched ‘antonymy’ and ‘corpus|corpora’ as keywords in the CNKI, an e-resource containing all Chinese journals, but no matches were retrieved. Therefore there is a need for further analysis of Chinese antonymy in this way.” Our goal was to examine opposites in Mandarin four-character constructions and the same 1 This paper was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology grants 104-2420-H-004 -003-MY2 and 108-2410-H-004-095-. Assistance from Wei-yu Chen and Yin-Wen Li was appreciated. The research outcome of this work was discussed at the 成果發表會of the Joint Research project 臺灣語言詞彙、構式及語意浮現機 制：跨界的探討. Comments from the research team and Prof. Jung-hsing Chang were highly appreciated. 2 We used “opposites” as a more general term instead of “antonyms” in this paper, but we kept Wang et al.’s (2010) [1] term in the literature review. The 2019 Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing ROCLING 2019, pp. 398-407 ©The Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing 398 observation was found—little research has been conducted on this topic. Our search in several major databases (e.g., EBSCOHost, ProQuest, CNKI, Google Scholar, etc.) using the keywords ‘corpus’ AND ‘four-character idiom’/‘idiom’/成語 (chengyu) AND ‘antonym’/ ‘opposites’ returned hardly any satisfactory results. This indicated that either the research of Mandarin opposites has evoked less interest or opposites have not been looked at because they are too straightforward. In this paper, we will show how a study on Mandarin opposites can be interesting and is worth running. The aim of the study was to investigate idiomatic four-character lexical constructions containing opposites in Mandarin (hereafter, four-word idioms). The present study intended to answer the following questions presented in (1) below: (1) (a) What are the patterns of the opposites in Mandarin four-word idioms? (b) What kinds of meanings are carried by the opposites in the four-word idioms? The occurrence of paired opposites in the structure of four-character idioms is an issue …

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