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This article describes emerging misogynistic labels involving the morpheme biăo ‘slut’ as a gendered personal suffix in the Chinese cyber lexicon. We analyze the morphological, semantic, and cognitive processes behind their coinage, and the way they are used across gender lines in Chinese social media as a community of discourse practice. Our findings show that women participate in female pejoration as much as men do, and that men are more inclined than women to use pejorative labels that specifically attack female empowerment. Additionally, men construct masculinity and power by using certain misogynistic labels as generics. We argue that verbal misogyny is part and parcel of a larger gender ideology by illuminating the mutual constitution of the linguistic pejoration of women and the gender order in postreform China. This study has implications for research on women's conditions in contemporary China, raises awareness of gender inequality, and lays the groundwork for social actions toward gender equality. (Gender, sexism, neologism, social media, Chinese)* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper examines the usage patterns of two passive constructions, the emerging zao construction and the conventional bei construction, in Chinese media language where the distributional ratio of the zao construction to the bei construction is conspicuously higher than in other genres. The difference is especially dramatic in Internet news headlines. To account for the uses, we adopt a corpus-driven constructionist approach, seeking to identify the semantics of the two constructions by means of collostructional analysis. Based on the corpus data, we argue that the two constructions differ primarily in the speaker/writer''s subjective experience of the event in which the patient is affected. Specifically, we invoke the psychological constructs of empathy and sympathy to account for the respective functions of the two passive constructions. The genre-specific usage patterns of the two constructions in the Internet news headlines are attributed to the pragmatic manipulation of semantics for the purpose of constructing stance and creating sensationalism. Cognitive psychological insights on human emotion, cognition and morality are discussed in support of embodied semantics and pragmatics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper addresses the development of construction-specific modal uses of hao ‘good’ in Mandarin discourse. My focus is the cultural relevancy of the pathway of change: an expression of value judgment gives rise to deontic modality in recurring discourse contexts. Mandarin is contrasted with Germanic languages with regard to lexical sources of change towards deontic modals. It is suggested that social interdependence of individuals and the cultural preference of collective agency are the driving forces behind the change of the Mandarin hao constructions as opposed to personal agency and autonomy which underlies the semantic development in Germanic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The repeated confirmation of the hypothesis of a negativity bias in cognitive psychology invited an assumption that the general asymmetry in the automatic processing of affective information should bear linguistic consequences, for language is inseparable from human cognition and emotion. This paper shows that the lexical semantics of emotive intensifiers in German, English and Chinese can be best explained in a cognitive-affective model of negativity bias. The parallel between a higher sensitivity to potentially threatening events at the neural level and the predominance of emotive intensifiers based on threat-relevant negative emotions at the linguistic level provides further evidence of the embodiment of linguistic conceptualisation. Ultimately, because the negativity bias is a vital component of our adaptive behaviour, the corresponding linguistic behaviour must be viewed as part of our dynamic system of adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mandarin Chinese yòu X yòu Y] is a semi-formulaic construction with two open slots X and Y, which admit a range of lexical input. Existing studies of this constructional idiom are incomplete due to the lack of a theoretical commitment to construction-level form-function pairing on the one hand and limitations in empirical data to support putative structural constraints on the other hand. This study takes a usage-based constructionist approach and offers quantitative and qualitative analyses of both naturally occurring corpus data and elicited native speaker response data. Our corpus-based findings demonstrate that yòu X yòu Y] as a constructional idiom is highly productive, admitting all three major lexical classes in its open slots with a preponderance of adjectives. Structural constraints on X and Y are subject to frequency of use and idiosyncrasies of lexical input. The compositional semantics of X and Y concentrates in the perceptual and evaluative domains of experience. Results from the response data demonstrate that yòu X yòu Y] expresses personal affective stance (i.e. personal liking or disliking) toward the perceptual information specified in the X and Y slots. Native speakers are not only aware of, but are able to employ, this constructional meaning in affectively appropriate contexts when given options that differed in constructional pattern but not in core lexical input. Together, our findings point to the expression of personal affective stance as the constructional pragmatic function of yòu X yòu Y] that is larger than the sum of the meanings of the components. • Usage-based constructionist approach to formulaic language. • Clarifies constructional meaning in relation to compositional meaning. • Provides additional data to construction-based stance research. • Employs complementary evidence from corpus and elicited data. • Contributes to methodological advances in pragmatic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]