| Being a kind of lexical phenomenon, popular expressions reflect the common concern of people. In recent years, studies on popular expressions spread in various fields, including sociology, economics, politics, culture, linguistics, etc., among which researches from linguistic perspective are especially rich. Those popular expressions range from single word like "X men (X 门:scandals)" family, "X ba (X 吧:small indoor entertainment venues)" family, "bei X (被 X:be forced to do things that should be done actively)" family and so on to phrases or idioms such as "rang X fei (让X 飞:cause to become, to be imperative or factitive)" and "she jian shang de X (舌尖上的X:a bite of X)", and finally to sentences like "A rong yi, B bu yi, qie xing qie zhen xi. (A容易, B 不易,且行且珍惜:A is easy; B is not. It is to be cherished.)". Thus, it is obvious that popular expression is an indispensible part of linguistic study. The new"luo X (裸 X: without)" family is one of them. The original meaning of "luo (裸)" in"luo X" is "the bareness of one’s body, of which people will feel ashamed". Lately, with the development of society and the influence of mass media, the new "luo X"’family like "luo juan (裸捐:donate all the personal assets to society)"’and "luo kao (裸考:take exams without enjoying any extra points:take exams without any preparations)" appears and arouses people’s interest.According to the materials collected by the writer, there have been some scholars who have studied the’luo X" family from various approaches. As for the semantic changes of "luo" in the new "luo X" family, the explicit transformation of "luo X" and its reasons are explored from the perspective of Implicit-Explicit Theory. In addition, Prototype Theory, Theory of ICM (Idealized Cognitive Model) and the idea of Family Resemblance are applied to probe into the process of the "luo X" family’s semantic derivation. Though these scholars have noticed the specialty of the new "luo X" family and have done some researches on it, they still deem the new "luo X" as a single word. Scarcely any researches regard "luo X" as a construction and almost nobody conducts relevant cognitive construction studies on it. And owing to limited data, the explanation for the production and cognitive process of the "luo X" construction is not comprehensive enough. Based on these limitations, three research questions are proposed in this study:1. Is the "luo X" a construction? What is the constructional meaning of it? 2. What are the properties of its components and the whole "luo X’ construction? 3. How is the construction produced and cognized?Consequently, on basis of Goldberg’s construction grammar, this thesis integrates ideas of conceptual metaphor and context theory into the Multiple Coercion Model and tries to conduct an overall study of the "luo X" construction. A closed corpus is established and qualitative and quantitative analysis methods are employed in this study After the thorough description and explanation of the "luo X" construction, it has been found that the abstract meaning "without" of the new "luo X" family cannot be easily composed by the meanings of its components "luo" and "X", which proves that the new "luo X" family is indeed a construction.In terms of components in it, general nouns and verbs expressing concrete activities can enter into the construction. The construction has endowed "luo" with 16 meanings. "Luo" and "X" at syntactic level is in modifier-core relation, namely modifier-head and adverbial-verb relation. In semantic level, "luo" and "X" can be in concomitant relation, time sequential order and ambiguous relation. For the whole construction, it has disyllabic tendency and it usually plays roles of Subject, Predicate, Object, Attribute and Adverbial in a sentence. Its conceptual meanings and affective meanings have gone through extensions. Pragmatically speaking, its properties of novelty and simplicity clarify the popularity of it and its limitations for "X" make it less productive as expected. And finally, it is concluded that the production and cognition of the "luo X" construction is ascribed to the effect of the Multiple Coercion Model. By exploring the "luo X" construction, this thesis is intended as a contribution to the understanding of "luo X" as well as enlightens the trans-language and trans-cultural communication. |
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