Antonymic oppositions in the structure of integrative semantic field kindness ↔ malice (based on the Chinese nouns)

The research accords with the interest of modern linguistics in studying the representation of opposite relations in the structure of the national emotional linguistic worldview. The aim of the study is to identify the main trends in representing antonymic oppositions in the structure of the integrative semantic field KINDNESS ↔ MALICE in the Chinese language and to discover peculiarities of the semantization of kindness and malice in Chinese substantive vocabulary. The article presents the results of structural-semantic study of the subfields KINDNESS and MALICE, reveals the specific components presented in the semantic complexes of antonymically correlating lexical-semantic groups in this integrative field and summarizes lexical manifestations of opposed differential components in the definitions of words in the opposite lexical-semantic groups. The research uses a complex of methods: paradigmatic analysis, statistical description, componential analysis of lexical meanings of words, definitional and comparative analyses. The results of the study can be applied in cognitive research aimed at studying categorization of the emotional world in the aspect of opposite relations, as well as in the practice of compiling an ideographic dictionary of antonyms of Chinese emotive vocabulary.