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The notional passive construction (NPC, henceforth) is claimed to be the most common form of passive and the earliest mode of passive expression in Chinese. However, under the view of cognitive construction grammar, NPC remains a mystery with its form not clearly defined and its function not particularly discussed. Taking a character-based historic...
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... Many researchers (e.g., Author, 2015;2018;Cheung et al., 1994: 485-501;Li, 1994;Lv & Zhu, 1952/1979Z. Wang, 2004) analyzed the syntactic features of BEIC and NPC in Chinese and the selection between them is argued to be sensitive to the animacy of the subject (which is also the theme in these two constructions), and the lexical semantics of the verb. ...
... Wang, 2004). Inherently causative verbs involving force recipients and complex event structures (including creation verbs and change of state verbs such as 写 xiě 'write' and 摇 yáo 'shake') tend to occur in NPC; surface contact verbs that do not involve change of state or force recipients, such as 踢 tī 'kick' and 捶 chuí 'thump', tend to occur in BEIC (Zhang, 2015(Zhang, , 2018. Many other factors, such as the context, lexicalization of verbal phrases, resultative compounds, and so forth, are also suggested to be relevant (Li, 1994;Z. ...
The Chinese language is changing, and like other languages, has been becoming more like English. This article focuses on the Englishization (Europeanization) of certain Chinese passive constructions. Previous research indicates that written Chinese has seen an increase in the use of the 被 bèi passive construction (BEIC) and a concomitant decrease in use of the notional passive construction (NPC) over time. This assertion is supported by a corpus-based analysis. An apparent-time research study shows that, in general, younger, more educated participants (those hypothesized to have more exposure to English) are more likely to use BEIC than are older, less educated participants in the sentence continuation task. However, this difference between groups is not captured in the binary forced choice task due to the increased use of BEIC under a conscious condition by the older, less educated participants. This finding sheds light on the psychological mechanism of internalization involved with Englishization.
This thesis takes an interest in the emergence and development of discourse markers. It develops within the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar and treats discourse markers as conventionalized form-function units and their diachronic change as a process of grammatical constructionalization. It addresses the following questions: (1) Which incremental changes are involved during the process that leads a linguistic element towards a discourse marker? (2) What motivational factors are behind specific constructional changes? (3) Are there cross-linguistic generalizations to be made, both in terms of the semantic and/or syntactic sources and the development paths? In order to approach these questions, the thesis draws on existing studies of grammaticalization and diachronic Construction Grammar that account for the case of discourse markers. It unites different theories and examines the formal and functional representations and especially changes of a construction on its way of becoming a discourse marker. In the search of cross-linguistically universal processes and/or patterns of change, it further develops a comparative approach. It examines a pair of linguistically heterogeneous expressions that typically function in the same pragmatic domain: i.e. topic-introducing discourse markers speaking of X (SPOX) in English and huashuo in Chinese. The study is corpus-based and includes both functional and frequency distributional analyses both panchronically and diachronically. The results show that SPOX and huashuo share quite a few formal-semantic properties as discourse markers and there are many overlaps in their functions and usage patterns. The major difference lies in their mechanisms in linking different topics together and establishing topical relevance. Diachronically, they share the semantic root of “speak” at the very beginning of their constructionalization and pragmaticalization processes, and both constructions were often used as clausal elements in a sentence prior to the emergence of discourse marking functions. But their individual development paths still have distinctive courses and specific motivating factors. On the basis of the observations made in this thesis, it appears that pragmatic strengthening, syntactic/prosodic detachment, scope expansion, and development of functional polysemy are universal processes during the constructionalization process of discourse markers, while formal reduction and semantic bleaching seem to be less categorical and more contingent upon the type of the discourse markers and differ from one case to another. The phenomena of layering, persistence, divergence, decategorialization and paradigmaticization seem to be universal common properties of emergent discourse markers as well.
This study investigates how Chinese bèi passive (B0, default) has developed from a byproduct of translation (B1) between English and Chinese toward two emergent ironic constructions (B2 and B3) in modern Mandarin. Despite their low frequency counts from any existing Chinese corpora, B2 and B3 expressions (notably the former) have worked their way into today’s Chinese popular discourse. We conducted an online survey using a questionnaire to examine the B2 and B3 constructions that reflect a speaker’s cognitive-pragmatic need for communicating an ironic thought to provide the very first systematic study of the development of the bèi passive from B0 (non-irony) and B1 (translationese) to ironic B2 and B3. We also used Pearson’s chi-square (χ2) test and multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to shed new light on the important claims we have made regarding the bèi constructions.KeywordsChinese bèi passiveUsage-basedTranslationeseIronyCognitive pragmatics
