English-Chinese Oppositional Collocations: A Social-Semiotic Perspective

• 作者: Jun Wang
• 来源期刊: 语言与符号学研究
• 学科: 文学
• 年，卷（期）: 2015,（3）
• 页码范围: 80-97
• 页数: 18页
• 分类号: H314

摘要

Oppositional collocations,such as dead nice in English,or shuai dai le(handsome dumb le,‘extremely handsome’)in Chinese,are expressions that use words with emotionally contradictory senses to achieve a single positive meaning.They are not just linguistic expressions or rhetorical devices,but signs that reflect the addresser’s identity and social position.Though between English and Chinese there are distinct differences in terms of formal features,distributive properties,and emotional impacts,the use of such collocations in both languages is often associated in the speaker’s mind with contexts characterized by a desire for informality and resistance to orthodoxy.Though the base of an oppositional collocation is the structurally controlling element for the whole expression,the collocate,represented as a degree adverb in English and degree complement in Chinese,is the emotionally controlling element,which not only reinforces the positive degree on the part of the base but,with some trace of negativity,takes the addresser away from formal or serious language.This essay investigates the phenomenon through a social-semiotic perspective derived from Halliday’s(1976)antilanguage and anti-society theories and Halliday&Hasan’s(1976)register theory.