New "Bei XX" Construction:a Frame Semantics Approach

In recent years, the new "bei xx" constructions such as“被自杀”("bei suicide"),“被就业”("bei employment"),’‘被捐款’’("bei donation") have acquired a lot of paper length due to its syntactic anomaly, semantic expressiveness, and high productivity. The aim of this research is to study this language phenomenon from the perspective of Frame Semantics with Cognitive Linguistics parameters, from which I could get its frame and producing mechanism, and then try to give an integrated explanation of its syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features.First of all, within the frame of new "bei xx", the three core frame elements constitute the basic relationship, that is Party A directly or indirectly harm Party B through the Event C. I propose that despite the part of speech of the "xx" part, as long as it could activate the harmful Event C with "bei" and invite the listeners’ inference of the frame, it would be a potential suitable "xx" part.Second, the mechanism for producing the eligible "bei xx" is frame coercion. After frame coercion, the suitable elements will be left out and profiled; the suitable ABC relationship in which A occupies a position that possesses the ability to cause B to suffer will be presented.Third, I summarize that there are roughly two meanings of this construction. One meaning indicates that Party B is forced to carry out a speech act "xx" by Party A while this act is fabricated. And the other refers to that Party B is forced into the state indicated by "xx", sometimes even without B’s knowledge. I suggest the conventionalization of frame knowledge and the process of frame coercion are the two major factors causing the ambiguity. Analysis shows that context could help us to encode this ambiguity.Fourth, I discussed about the constraints and predictability of this new construction. In the first place, Party B has to be an animate human or organization. Then, for those verbs that has already fall into the traditional bei-construction and those non-verbs that rarely envoke an important and meaningful event, for now, it would be hard for them to be accepted as new "bei xx". Also, the act has to be something related to the participant’s willingness or something worth being rumored about. As the language is dynamic in nature, we predicate that some words may fall into the new "bei xx" perfectly well in the future though there might not be suitable now. And the new "bei xx" will not be that "new" anymore, instead, it is just a subtype of passive construction with "bei" as the marker. And it might lose its quotation mark gradually.