The same character or word has two opposite meanings, and this phenomenon is called the enantiosemy in traditional Chinese. It was as early as 1728 that Joseph de Prémare concerned about this special phenomenon in the Chinese language. In the book Notitia Linguae Sinicae, he cited four examples of Chinese enantiosemy characters such as “Luan”(亂), “Du”(毒), “Gu”(蠱) and “Qing”(清). Later in 1891, G. Schlegel published an article entitled “On the Causes of Antiphrasis in Language” in T’oung Pao, in which nearly twenty Chinese enantiosemy characters were listed and analysed. Upon closer examination, some of the Chinese enantiosemy characters cited by Joseph de Prémare and G. Schlegel do not stand up to scrutiny, because they are not objective and clear enough in terms of a basic but crucial issue - the connotation of the “enantios” in the enantiosemy. This paper analyses all the Chinese enantiosemy characters listed by Joseph de Prémare and G. Schlegel, and summarises Western scholars’ perceptions of the “enantios” in the enantiosemy. On the basis of the compilation of Chinese scholars’ viewpoints, the connotation of the “enantios” in the enantiosemy is clearly defined as “opposite” and “relative” two areas; and mainly borrowed from the research results of the antonym, the “enantios” is divided into four types of relationship such as the complementarity, the antonym, the converseness and the pragmatic.

• 陳菡(武漢大學文學院講師, 研究方向, 漢字學, 古代漢語詞彙與訓詁) | Han CHEN