An EIR Model Analysis Of The Chinese Pragmatic Negation Construction "S Vde Bushi A, Ershi B.”

As a marked negation in natural language, pragmatic negation, or metalinguistic negation, had already been brought to light and talked about in the West in the 1930 s. But In-depth explorations of this language phenomenon were not initiated until the establishment of Pragmatics.Previous studies by Chinese scholars mainly apply the principles and maxims in Pragmatics to explain the generation and interpretation of pragmatic negation.Pragmatic functions of this language phenomenon are also among the topics heatedly commented on.With the emergence of Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar,the study of this language phenomenon and its representative syntactic pattern“bushi A,ershi B.(不是A,而是B。)”is further advanced.In recent years,expressions of the syntactic form“S Vde bushi A,ershi B.(S V的不是A,而是B。)”flood web forums like BBS and blogs and even jump into news headlines after the popular network phrase“ge chide bushi mian,shi jimo.(哥吃的不是面,是寂寞。)”Admittedly,this construction is not a new invention,but its dual use as semantic and pragmatic negation,particularly the latter type,makes it deserve our attention and study.We can find many papers taking traditional approaches to study its syntactic,semantic and pragmatic features.There are also some papers that provide rudimental insights into its generation and interpretation processes from the perspectives of Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar.But all previous studies are characterized by their static and speculative descriptions and explanations,most of which lack theoretical and data support.Thus,their conclusions are not satisfactorily convincing.As the production and interpretation of language is such a complex process which may involve different cognitive mechanisms, based on theories in Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar, this paper tries to combine three cognitive strategies(Event-domain Cognitive Model, Multiple Inheritance, Cognitive Reference Point) to form an EIR model to explain the generation and interpretation processes of the pragmatic negation construction “S Vde bushi A, ershi B.”, and discuss its syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features in light of the established model with the support of a corpus of 200 tokens from previous reference materials and the people.cn.In our study, we set out from the origin of the language phenomenon of pragmatic negation and the construction “S V de bushi A, ershi B.” As an embodiment of the Embodied Philosophy, ECM provides the semantic basis and componential parts of the construction, the relationships between S, V, A, and B are studied in the ECM model. We find that A and B are not in a coordinating or choice relationship held by traditional scholars. Instead, B chiefly manifests itself as a specification on the subject S or the object A. We also find that, contrary to the traditional semantic negation use, the negation operator “bushi” here serves as a down-toner and conveys a deeper sense of affirmation. Besides, we advocate a tripartition of the constructional meaning based on corpus study, i.e. apart from the “acquisition” and “elimination” sense, it also expresses a “display” sense. As different component constructions and detailed contents particular to specific events, which are stored as information chunks in our mind, are brought into prominence, different realizations of the “S Vde bushi A, ershi B.” constructions are obtained via the multiple inheritance process. In the view of Construction Grammar, pragmatics is not to be separated from semantics, ECM and CRP together account for the pragmatic functions such as setting up discourse traps to express counter-expectation information, sublimation of cognition, and highlighting of subjectivity.