A Study on Chinese and Korean Antisense Directional Compound Words

This article takes the antonym directional compound words “前後” and “앞뒤” in Chinese and Korean as the research objects, and conducts a survey and analysis based on practical corpus from the perspectives of syntax and semantics. Although both languages have such compounding words formed by antonyms, there are certain differences in their syntactic and semantic distributions. The characteristics exhibited by the semantic types and distributions of the two words in our corpus correspond to the syntactic distribution characteristics of the two words we investigated. In our corpus statistics, we found that the Chinese word “前後” often depends on nouns or verbs before or after it in the sentence to express its meaning, and there are relatively few cases where it can act as the subject or object of the sentence alone. This syntactic dependency reflects the close semantic relationship between the two words. That is to say, when Chinese users perceive the “前後” in the reverse conceptual space, they are accustomed to relying on reference objects and highlighting the space divided by the reference objects. Therefore, “前後” can express both “conjunctive quantity” and “disjunctive quantity” in both the spatial and temporal domains. In contrast, the Korean word “앞뒤” appears more frequently in the positions of subject and object, which contrasts with the syntactic characteristics of Chinese “前後”. This indicates that Korean “앞뒤” is more independent and referential than Chinese “before and after”, and Korean native speakers tend to perceive a continuous overall range without highlighting the reference object when they perceive “앞뒤”. Therefore, when extended to the temporal and abstract domains, they tend to express the “covering conjunctive meaning” and “fusing conjunctive meaning” of a continuous overall range.