Suggestions for Further Research

The present study adopts Jones’ (2002) functional framework of antonymy to investigate antonym co-occurrences in Mandarin Chinese. In the following, several directions for further research on antonymy in Mandarin Chinese are briefly discussed.

First, the findings of the present study may need to be further verified with large-scale corpora of written language, for the corpus used in the present study, i.e., the Chinese Word Sketch Engine, only contains newspaper texts. As suggested in Kilgarriff (1997) and Stubbs (2001), different corpora have different sources and purposes, so a given research question may obtain different results from different corpora. While the Chinese Word Sketch Engine makes the present study comparable with Jones (2002) in terms of data sources (Section 3.1), it is fair and reasonable to ask whether antonym co-occurrences in Mandarin Chinese function similarly in

newspaper texts and, say, literary works.

Second, the present study focuses on the textual functions of antonym co-occurrences in written language. Further research may be conducted on how antonyms in Mandarin Chinese function in other modes of communication, such as spoken language. As proposed in Jones (2006, 2007), antonyms in English have different functional distributions in different modes of communication (Section 2.2.2.3). In Mandarin Chinese, how antonyms function might be affected by modes of communication as well. In functional linguistics, it is of interest and significance to the functional approach as to how a given language-internal phenomenon, such as antonymy, is affected by language-external factors, such as modes of communication (Biq 2000:378).

Third, the model adopted by the present study, i.e., Jones’ (2002) functional framework of antonymy, may have acquisitional applications. For example, one of the issues worthy of our further pursuit is how antonyms function in child-produced and child-directed speech. This issue has been addressed in English (Jones and Murphy 2005) (Section 2.2.2.3), and it should be addressed in Mandarin Chinese as well.

In fact, all of the three directions for further research on antonymy in Mandarin Chinese direct our attention to a multi-corpus, cross-linguistic approach to antonym co-occurrences. While the rapid development of corpus linguistics has made it possible to examine antonym co-occurrences from a usage-based perspective, no corpus is fairly representative of all the genres, styles, modes, topics, and sources (Kilgarriff 1997; Stubbs 2001). Meanwhile, for Jones’ (2002) functional framework of antonymy to gain more descriptive power, it needs to be examined in as many languages as possible, with language-specific structural features taken into account.

These challenges encourage further research on antonym co-occurrences to take on a multi-corpus, cross-linguistic approach so that we can gain a deeper understanding of

how such a language-internal phenomenon interacts with language-specific properties and language-external factors.

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