A CIM Study On The Chinese Emerging “Gezhong X” Construction

In recent years,the emerging Chinese “gezhong X” construction is becoming more and more popular.It has attracted many scholars' attention.However,most of previous studies on the construction still remain in the static researches from semantics,pragmatic and cognitive aspects.They haven't studied the internal mechanism such as the generation and development of the construction.Based on the frequently-used 171 linguistic data collected from corpus and Internet,this thesis studies the construction from dynamic aspect.From cognitive linguistics' perspective,the present study attempts to establish a new theoretical model(CIM Model)by integrating Construction Coercion Theory,Inheritance Theory with Conceptual Metonymy and Conceptual Metaphor Theories.From the semantic,pragmatic and syntactic perspectives,the thesis reveals the generation mechanism of the novel “gezhong X” construction and explains the cognitive reasons how “gezhong” becomes an adverb as the result of grammaticalization.The major findings of the thesis are:Firstly,according to Goldberg's definition about construction and our collected data about the novel "gezhong X" construction,we can get the conclusion that the emerging “gezhong X” is a construction for the following reasons:first of all,“gezhong X” is a stored pairing of form and meaning as “gezhong” is a fixed word followed by different speeches of X such as nouns,verbs,adjectives,and its steady semantic features are in line with different collocations of X.Secondly,we cannot get the construction meaning of “gezhong X” by its component “gezhong” or different X separately because the semantics would be changed after combination.Thirdly,the frequency of using various expressions of “gezhong X” is sufficient.Secondly,after the discussion about above theories,we can see that they have their own theoretical emphasis.Yet,when these theories are used to reveal the cognitive generation mechanism of the novel construction “gezhong X”,they can only explain particular aspects of this construction rather than a comprehensively satisfactory explanation.They have their own individual deficiencies.Thus,it's feasible to combine them together in a cohesive and logical way to explain the cognitive generation mechanism more comprehensively and satisfactorily.Thirdly,under the CIM model with information analysis,this thesis provides a systematic account for the generating mechanisms of the Chinese emerging “gezhong X” construction and its features on syntactic,semantic and pragmatic levels qualitatively and quantitatively.And the interpretation process of the emerging “gezhong X” is like this:(1)the novel construction inherits some features of conventional construction;(2)under the double-direction coercion,“gezhong” and X may be coerced into changing their previous features,own new features and play different syntactic function in the sentence;(3)under the influence of metaphor,“gezhong” varies from concrete meaning to abstract meaning.On the contrary,under the influence of metonymy,X is used to refer to another related situation.Syntactically,the emerging “gezhong X” constructions can be divided into predicative phrases and subjective phrases,which are always used as subject or predicate in a sentence.In corpus,the speech of X mostly tends to be verbs and adjectives.Semantically,in the emerging construction,influenced by the construction coercion,“gezhong” has been coerced into an adverb or an adjective and we can conclude that “gezhong” has two main semantic features: all kinds of something from horizontal direction;high degree from vertical direction.Similarly,coerced by “gezhong”,X can be verbs or adjectives.What is more,under the influence of metaphor construction coercion,the “gezhong X” are metaphoric expressions.Pragmatically,under the influence of double-direction coercion,the neologism “gezhong X” construction has different pragmatic meanings in different discourses.This usage reveals the language user's psychological tendency of pursuing economy and novelty,as well as subjectivity in language usage.