A Study Of “X Jiu Shi Ren Xing” Chinese Construction Based On MF Model

Recently, “y?u qián jiù shì rèn xìng” is very popular online, giving birth to “nián q?ng jiù shì rèn xìng”, “pi?o liàng jiù shì rèn xìng” and so on; they together form a “X jiù shì rèn xìng” construction family. However, by far there is no detailed explanation and corpus analysis of this construction in linguistic field, and the existing theories cannot expound it thoroughly.In order to fill this gap, this thesis, based on Cognitive Linguistics(including Construction Grammar), attempts to unveil the generative mechanism of “X jiù shì rèn xìng” construction. We integrate “the Multiple Inheritance” and “Figure-Ground” into a new MF model and find that this novel construction family is formed by two steps. First, “y?u qián jiù shì rèn xìng” inherits from four Chinese constructions “ y?u qián”, “rèn xìng”, “‘jiù shì'—strengthening affirmation” and “Causal construction” simultaneously, and then it is blended to figure “y?u qián”, the reason of the corresponding event. Second, after the appearance of “y?u qián jiù shì rèn xìng”, net citizens imitate it in different event contexts, by segregating one of the event elements under the influence of Figure-Ground and replacing “y?u qián” with it; constructions formed in the second step are all directly or indirectly coerced by the construction “y?u qián jiù shì rèn xìng”.The meaning of this construction family is to highlight one of the event elements and comment the event or phenomenon as “rèn xìng”, expressing such pragmatic meanings as mild criticism, sarcasm, banter, self-mockery, show off and humor. Moreover, 368 items are collected from Baidu, Sina, Fenghuang, Xinhua websites, forming a closed corpus to support the theoretical research.This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter one introduces the motivation, purpose, scope, methodology, data collection, and layout of the thesis. Chapter two reviews previous researches from the lexical, psychological, cultural and cognitive perspectives, and finds out the gap. Chapter three comprises theoretical framework—MF Model, which is used as the theoretical framework of this paper. Chapter four analyzes the data and accounts for the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of this construction with MF model. Chapter five concludes the thesis, summarizing the contributions and problems of the paper. And the contributions are as follows: 1. The thesis sets up a brand-new MF Model to reveal the underlying generative mechanism of the construction, which is the highlight of this paper; 2. The paper first attempts to analyze this new cyber construction in detail and systematically, filling the gap of previous study; 3. The paper also establishes a closed corpus with 368 items collected from the Internet, newspapers and magazines, supporting the theoretical points. In the end, the shortages and limitations of this paper are as follows: 1. The feasibility of the brand-new model needs further development and proof; 2. The corpus is not exhaustive.