Chinese "Bu Yao Tai Xp" Construction: A Poly-coercion And Dynamic-inheritance Perspective

Within the framework of Goldberg’s Cognitive Construction Grammar, based on thePoly-Coercion and Dynamic-Inheritance (PCDI in short) provided by the author, this thesisattempts to investigate the Chinese “Bu Yao Tai XPN” construction, so as to find out themotivation and mechanisms of this particular construction. This dynamic study will not onlytry to provide a feasible solution to the study of popular language phenomena, but also toprovide evidence of how people understand and process reality.The conventional construction, in the form of “Bu Yao Tai XPC”, is an imperativeconstruction, a construction representing a negative attitude towards the excessiveness of“XPC”. This construction is mainly used to admonish somebody for or prohibit somebodyfrom doing something excessively.The new construction, in the form of “Bu Yao Tai XPN”, is a declarative construction, aconstruction highlighting the element “XPN” via the context in which it occurs. This “Bu YaoTai XPN” construction designates the extreme extent of “XPN”, aiming to expresscomplimentary and condemnatory meanings at the semantic level. At the pragmatic level, itdesignates an exaggerated attitude towards the affirmative or negative extremity ofdescription.In order to find out the motivation and mechanisms of Chinese “Bu Yao Tai XPN”construction, this thesis employs a Poly-Coercion and Dynamic-Inheritance (PCDI)perspective based on the framework of Goldberg’s Cognitive Construction Grammar. Toachieve the research aims, the thesis first, depending on undetachability, perfectability, andcontextual constraint, sets up a closed corpus including175items and describes them in detail.Further, as a strong explanatory power, the PCDI has accounted for the motivation and mechanisms by virtue of inspecting the intrinsic relations of interaction, coercion andinheritance. Then, the phonological, syntactical, semantic and pragmatic features of theChinese “Bu Yao Tai XPN” construction have been explicitly analyzed.Finally, the author arrives at the conclusion and our main contributions are as follows.Firstly, based on the data collected from the Internet engines, the author has set up a closedcorpus of175items of the Chinese “Bu Yao Tai XPN” construction.Secondly, the author initially establishes its theoretical framework by integrating thecognitive construction coercion and cognitive construction inheritance theories into thePoly-Coercion and Dynamic-Inheritance and applies it to the analysis of the Chinese “Bu YaoTai XPN” construction in order to strengthen the explanatory power of the new theory.Thirdly, this thesis makes its first attempt to systematically study the Chinese “Bu YaoTai XPN” construction within the framework of PCDI to find out the motivation andmechanisms for the Chinese “Bu Yao Tai XPN” construction, and then tries to analyze thephonological, syntactical, semantic, and pragmatic features of this construction respectively.