A Dynamic Categorization Study Of The Chinese "Bie Na X (Bu)Dang Y" Construction

A TV serial titled “别拿豆包不当干粮1(bie na doubao budang ganliang)” hasrejuvenated an inland craze for the Chinese construction “bie na X (bu)dang Y”,especially appearing as news headlines, titles of books, articles, advertisements, etc.According to the modern Chinese grammar, this construction inherits informationfrom three superordinate constructs, namely, disposal construction of “na”,(double)negative construction and bie’s imperative construction. And many scholars havestudied them by means of traditional, semantic, pragmatic, transformational andcognitive approaches. Still, up to now, no one has studied “bie na X (bu)dang Y”construction, yet. In accordance with integration theory of “1+1>2” that CognitiveLinguistics (including Construction Grammar) has advocated, this construction bearsparticular meaning which cannot be calculated via compositional processes. It isargued that this construction indicates the speaker’s persuasion on deprofiling (hiding)or profiling (highlighting) typical conceptual attributes of Y that the X has possessed.This construction has a function of readjusting one’s categorization by means of thespeaker’s persuasion.Within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics (including ConstructionGrammar), based on the categorization theory, especially prototype theory, and thestatement that linguistic decategorization is an integrated part of linguisticcategorization that first proposed by Hopper and Thompson (1984), this thesis raisesan assumption of dynamic categorization process at conceptual level because thedifferent manners of individual construal towards a concept keeps one’s conceptualsystem enriching and elaborating in understanding of the world. The establisheddynamic categorization process including original categorization, decategorizationand recategorization is employed to find out the underlying interpretation mechanismof the Chinese “bie na X (bu)dang Y” construction. Moreover, this paper probes intodiscovering three possible working mechanisms of conceptual decategorization andrecategorization in this construction:1). construction and contextual coercion;2).Prominence Principle based on figure/ground reversion;3). metaphtonymy. Besides,the author also conducts an all-sided analysis of the collected519items including 372items of “bie na X dang Y” construction and its variants,147items of “bie naX budang Y” construction and its variants to demonstrate how its dynamiccategorization process operates in terms of the syntactic, semantic and pragmaticproperties of the construction.The paper mainly consists of five parts and is organized as follows:Chapter One focuses on a general introduction to this study, including themotivations, research object and scope, the objectives, methodology and layout ofthe paper.Chapter Two functions as the literature review. Since there is no previousresearch on this construction, this chapter mainly works on reviews and comments onformer researches on the three superordinate constructions of “bie na X (bu)dang Y”construction: disposal construction and disposal construction of “na”,(double)negative construction and imperative construction of “bie”. And then the authorargues the constructionality of “bie na X (bu)dang Y” construction.Chapter Three presents the theoretical framework. To fill the research gap, adynamic categorization process at conceptual level which composes of originalcategorization, decategorization and recategorization stages has been put forward toaccount for the interpretation mechanism of “bie na X (bu)dang Y” construction.Besides, the three possible working mechanisms that contribute to this dynamicprocess have also been revealed.Chapter Four is the data analysis and discussion. This paper has exhaustivelycollected data from people.com.cn, CNKI, Baidu, Google authoritative searchingengines and Management System of Broadcast Media Language Corpus, and formeda small closed database of519items. Through a comprehensive analysis, the authoris in hope of revealing how the dynamic categorization process has operated in termsof the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of the construction.Syntactically, the syntactic categories of X and Y are flexible by allowing nouns(or nominal phrases), verb (phrases), adjectives or even clauses. And meanwhile, thesyntactic categories of X and Y can be unmatched. For these unique syntacticproperties, the author attempts to recourse to the construction coercion for anexplanation.Semantically, the construction meaning requires its lexical entries X and Y not only can arouse conceptual mapping on basis of interpreter’s encyclopediaknowledge but also should bear certain conceptual incompatibility to conduct thedynamic categorization. Moreover, the author roughly classifies the data into threetypes according to the “semantic transparency” of the construction and names them:transparent type, transparent-obscure type and obscure type. And then, the authordemonstrates the dynamic categorization processes of cases of each type.Pragmatically, the construction not only possesses economy and novelty but alsopossesses subjectivity to either give a negative reasoning or a positive reasoning tothe audience. The author also warns for construction vulgarization at the end of thispart.Chapter five closes with a brief conclusion and lists major contributions of thisstudy:1) To propose a dynamic categorization process used to observe the interpretationmechanism of the Chinese “bie na X (bu)dang Y” construction, and meanwhile togo further to find out the working mechanisms of this model.2) To establish a small closed database of519items to testify the efficiency ofour dynamic categorization process.This chapter also points out the limitations of this study and gives somesuggestions for the further research of this construction.