A Cognitive Linguistic Approach To Novel Bei Construction

The creation of bei zisha in2008leads to the popularity of novel bei constructionon the Internet. As it breaks the existing grammar rules and expresses more abundantspeaker-based meanings, it successfully catches scholars’ great attention.The thesis reviews the previous researches concerning its syntax, semantics,pragmatics and motivation. Based on the data collected from online news fromifeng.com and people.com, this thesis sets about conducting in-depth analysis overresearch questions so as to explore the theoretical motivation within the cognitiveframework.The research questions of this thesis are summarized as follows:1) What is thesyntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of the novel construction compared withthe prototypical one?2) What is the theoretical motivation giving rise to thesedistinctive features?By analyzing data, author gives a relatively detailed description to its syntactic,semantic and pragmatic characteristics. From the syntactic perspective, the syntacticconstituents are diversified and the implied doer/causer can not be foregrounded. Fromthe semantic perspective, there is a semantic contrast within the framework; theaffectedness weakens and the subjectivity and negation increases; from the pragmaticperspective, it not only indicates the sympathy over the experiencer and theabomination towards the implied doer, but also rhetorical functions including sarcasm,teasing and irony.The weakening eventiveness and the increasing subjectivity compared with theprototypical bei construction make the ungrammatical construction acceptable, andmeanwhile, give rise to abundant pragmatic meanings. Applying the subjectivity andsubjectification theory, the thesis tries to give an explanation to the above mentionedproperties. From the speaker’s affect, the construction expresses speaker’s sympathyand detest. The increasing subjectivity improves the acceptability of semantic contrast.From the speaker’s perspective (which is always closely related to affect), the speakeradopts a more subjective point of view so as to express his/her negative attitude. Thereferential function weakens and subjective descriptive function increases. As a result,any syntactic constituents are free to enter the construction. And meanwhile, thechange of the perspective removes the syntactic constrains, making the diversifiedconstituents acceptable. From the speaker’s epistemic stance, the construction expresses speaker’s subjective judgment toward the truth condition of propositionalmeaning. As the occurrence of the involved event is against people’s expectation, italso embodies rhetorical functions including sarcasm, teasing and irony.The study may facilitate our understanding of subjectification and subjectivitytheory and make some contributions to language teaching.