A Cognitive Study On Chinese Structure “Shen X”

With the rapid development of society and massive media,plenty of popular cyber expressions bloom and are widely used in daily life in the form of word,phrase and sentence which gradually becomes concerned in linguistic study.“Shen X（神 X）”as one of instantiations,generates a brand-new usage and more and more words are derived from this construction,which attract people’s attention.However,relevant studies majorly focus on the grammatical features such as semantic meaning,syntax and pragmatic function of “shen”.Few of them regard “shen” and its components as a whole from construction perspective and explore its meaning generation mechanism and process.The present study intends to make an overall analysis of “shen X” from the perspective of Construction Grammar and integrates Construction Grammar and Conceptual Blending Theory to reveal the meaning generation mechanism and process of “shen X”.This thesis collects 263 items of linguistic data from the web pages like People’s Daily Online,Ifeng Net and Sina Net and Microblog,and by adopting qualitative and quantitative analysis methods,the collected corpus is classified and analyzed so that a full interpretation of “shen X” is given in the light of Construction Grammar and the integrated framework.Three research questions are raised as follows:1.Is “shen X” a construction? If so,what are the grammatical properties of “shen X”?2.What is the cognitive mechanism of “shen X”?3.What is the meaning generation mechanism and process of “shen X”?This thesis finds that “shen X” is a construction with the meaning of unusual and unexpected,unexpectedly in that the construction meaning cannot be deduced from the composition of its components “shen” and “X”.At the same time,“shen X”displays its special grammatical properties in syllabic,syntactic,semantic and pragmatic aspects.According to the data,most of the syllables of “shen X” are tri-syllabic which is in line with the syllabic features of new Chinese quasi-affix while the number of disyllabic words is relatively small.At the syntactic level,“shen X”construction often plays such roles as subject,object,predicate,complement and individual clause in superordinate constructions.Moreover,the fixed item “shen” and variable “X” are in the relationship of modifier-head within the construction.As for its semantic extension,this thesis traces the meaning development of “shen” and finds that “shen” gains a new usage as an adverb based on the noun and adjective,which proves that the morpheme “shen” is experiencing grammaticalization and becoming a quasi-affix.Additionally,its pragmatic functions include different affective meanings,personal and social expectation deviation,and higher productivity.The cognitive mechanism of “shen X” lies in the interaction among syllabic,syntactic,semantic and pragmatic constructions.The meaning generation process of “shen X” is ascribed to the interaction between coercion effect and conceptual blending,and it is found that the lexical coercion,constructional coercion and context factors together form a multiple coercion to influence the meaning formation of “shen X”.Essentially,metaphor and metonymy as basic cognitive mechanism play a decisive role in “shen X”meaning production.The present study proves the power of Construction Grammar in interpreting Chinese linguistic phenomena and enriches the studies of word construction,as well as presents a diverse perspective for Chinese quasi-affix studies.