Date of Award
Fall 2025
Document Type
Thesis
Terms of Use
© 2025 Che Lu. All rights reserved. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may only be used for non-commercial, educational, and research purposes. For all other uses, including reproduction and distribution, please contact the copyright holder.
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Linguistics Department
First Advisor
K. David Harrison
Second Advisor
Michael Donovan
Abstract
This thesis aims to contribute to the study of contranyms — a special kind of polysemy where one word, character, or even morpheme, has two contradictory meanings — from a comparative perspective by examining representative examples in Classical Chinese, English, and German, with a brief consideration of the absence of such phenomena in Modern Chinese. With the help of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) and Hegelian dialectics, this study will analyze how such words encode semantic dialectics and the evolution of meaning.
The selection of these three languages reflects their distinct typologies and approaches to meaning formation. Classical Chinese, as an isolating language, produces abundant contranyms through polysemic logographs and flexible word order. English, as an analytical language, relies highly on context and displays contranyms through contextual and pragmatic development. German, with its inflectional morphology and system of prefixes, reveals how structural variation can generate opposing meanings from shared prefixes.
Together, these languages represent three distinct mechanisms of semantic formation, allowing us to observe how contranyms emerge not arbitrarily but through various linguistic backgrounds. The significance of contranyms lies in their capacity to reveal how languages handle contradiction and thus how speakers conceptualize ambiguity, opposition, and unity at the level of the word itself.
The hypothesis of this thesis is that though contranyms from these languages emerge from have various linguistic and cultural backgrounds, contranyms, as a cognitive phenomenon, have roots in all three languages and derive from underlying cognitive mechanisms such as negation and semantic shift.
Recommended Citation
Lu, Che , '26, "Between Opposite and Unity: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Contranyms in Classical Chinese, German, and English" (2025). Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards. 1066.
https://works.swarthmore.edu/theses/1066