A Cognitive Study Of Chinese “Hao Bu AP” Construction From The Perspective Of Interactive Coercion Between Construction And Lexicon

“Hao Bu AP” is a common language phenomenon in modern Chinese. Many linguists, from different perspectives, have sudied on it. The most important characteristic of “Hao Bu AP” is that it has two different meanings: an affirmative sense and a negative sense. Sometimes these two meanings can coexist in one sentence. In different contexts, this construction will have different senses. Most scholars solely investigate these two meanings of “Hao Bu AP” from the historical and semantic perspectives. Hence, many research problems need to be solved, for example, what’s the motivation that makes the construction different in meaning? Researchers rarely make inquiries about these questions.Based on construction grammar, firstly “Hao Bu AP” construction is analyzed to be a form-meaning pairing. According to Goldberg’s construction coercion, Taylor’s lexical coercion and the coercion explanation of Wang Yin, the paper puts forward the interactive coercion model between construction and lexicon. With this interactive coercion theory, this thesis explores the deep mechanism of the “Hao Bu AP” construction. From the specific analysis, we find that the whole construction is used to emphasize the extent of the “AP” in it. At the pragmatic level, the construction designates an exaggerated attitude towards the affirmative or negative extremity of description.The current study applies the interactive coercion model to analyze the “Hao Bu AP” construction. When the construction expresses an affirmative meaning of its “AP”, the affirmative meaning is conceptualized by the constructional coercion, and the negative sense of the “Bu” disappears. The word “Bu” is coerced by the “Hao Bu AP” construction. But in the negative meaning of the construction, the meaning of “Bu” is consistent with the meaning of the construction, so the coercion between them is effect-magnifying.The research methods and major findings of the paper are listed in the following three aspects:1. Based on the authoritative CCL, the current study has built a closed corpus including 1271 items with the Chinese “Hao Bu AP” construction. And the paper does a comprehensive study on the phonological, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic features of the construction.2. According to construction grammar, this paper establishes its theoretical framework by integrating constructional coercion and lexical coercion into interactive coercion model. And with this model, the polysemy and the cognitive mechanism of the “Hao Bu AP” are deeply explored. The explanatory power of the interactive coercion theory is strengthened.3. From an explicit analysis of the construction, we find that in different situations, “Hao” of the construction has different functions. “Hao” can coerce the “Bu” in the affirmative type of the construction, so the “Bu” becomes a redundant word without actual meanings. The form of “AP” has a great influence on the meaning of the whole construction. When we use different “APs” in the “Hao Bu AP” construction, the types of the construction may be different. One is the affirmative meaning, and the other is the negative meaning of the construction. So,the “AP” can coerce the “Hao Bu AP” construction, and the stability of the constructional meaning can be changed by its “AP”. What’s more, the “APs” in the different senses of the construction have different characteristics.