An AD~+ Study On The Chinese Neologism X F?ng Construction

In recent years,the word family of X f?ng composed of new expressions such as???and???,has become popular among people's lives.However,previous studies on X f?ng are extremely rare and such gaps are found:either without theoretical discussion or without quantitative corpus-based statistics to support the argument.From the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics(including Construction Grammar), this thesis proposes to regard X f?ng as a neologism construction and tries to discuss it with Autonomy-Dependence Alignment under Langacker's Cognitive Grammar. However, due to the particularity of this construction, the original Autonomy-Dependence Alignment fails to offer a comprehensive explanation for its cognitive mechanism. In order to fill the gap, this thesis purports to integrate Conceptual Metonymy Theory and Construction Coercion Theory with Autonomy-Dependence Alignment, establishing AD+ Model in an attempt to offer an all-round explanation for the productive mechanism of X f?ng Construction. Meanwhile, a closed corpus is established with 302 tokens searched from the Internet, in hope of discussing the syllabic, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features in a systemic way.The major contributions of this research are as follows:Firstly, remedying the deficiencies of Autonomy-Dependence Alignment in Cognitive Grammar proposed by Langacker(1987, 1991, 2008) with Conceptual Metonymy Theory and Construction Coercion Theory by establishing AD+ Model to explicate the cognitive mechanism of X f?ng Construction. Besides, a new type of Construction Coercion is proposed, namely, Quasi-affix Coercion, which enriches and develops Construction Coercion Theory by extending coercion into the level below word.As is sketched in Figure 0.1,the word f?ng was originally used as a noun and was a autonomous structure that existed independently.However,with the continuing development of neologisms,the word f?ng has gradually been grammaticalized and become a quasi-affix-f?ng.Accordingly,its meaning is also altered from a kind of concrete natural phenomenon into the abstract meaning of??(storm),??(trend),??(style),or??(ethos),functioning as the manifestation of semantic categorizing.Conceptual Metonymy Theory provides the cognitive mechanism for this process of semantic change.As the property of quasi-affix is not so stable as that of noun,the former autonomous structure becomes a dependent structure which can not be used alone.Meanwhile,it needs an autonomous structure X to describe it in detail and make its meaning clearer.The study shows that in the combining process of X and-f?ng,the former will be coerced by the latter,which is called Quasi-affix Coercion.No matter what syntactic category that X falls in,it will own the property of a noun in the composite structure after the coercion.Accordingly,the property of thingness will be shown in the semantic aspect.Secondly, a corpus with 302 X f?ng Constructs collected from baidu and google is established for the first time in making analyses on the syllabic, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of X f?ng Construction systemically with AD+ Model. The main findings are listed as follows:(1) Syllabically, disyllable construction+ f?ng(trisyllable construction) type takes up the overwhelming majority of X f?ng Construction, adding up to 234 items in the corpus of 302 tokens with the proportion of 77.48%. It undertakes the major representation of X f?ng Construction with respect to syllable and shows the prototypicality. This is because the current words are mostly inclined to assemble with-f?ng.(2) Syntactically, there are four representations, including NP, VP, AP, as well as clause. The construction type of �NP+f?ng� is proved to be the prototypical one, which accounts for 174 items with the proportion of 57.62% and shows the prototypicality. Non-nominative words will bear the Quasi-affix Coercion from-f?ng during the assembling process, thus exerting temporary shift on the X slot and endow the X slot with the property of a noun.(3)Semantically,features of X f?ng Construction are divided into internal ones and external ones.Internally,X f?ng Construction can express three different constructional meanings,including:a)the prevalence(of a event or action);b)the feature or style(of a prominent thing);c)the ethos(of a certain area or group).These meanings are closely related to the conversed meanings of-f?ng through Metonymy.Externally speaking,X f?ng Construction is often collocated with such verbs as??and??,as well as such quantifiers as??and??.This indicates that the grammaticalization degree of-f?ng in�a)�is not thorough,with some of the original meaning still retained.(4) Pragmatically, X f?ng Construction shows various kinds of pragmatic features including productivity, economy, non-subjectivity, evaluation and novelty.