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This paper addresses the Modem Standard Chinese shi-de construction, a controversial phenomenon both in linguistics and in foreign language teaching. By adopting a conceptualist view of grammatical structures and by taking into account the role of discourse pragmatics in grammar, the current study is able to provide a unitary account of different shi-de constructions, which have been thought to be unrelated. More specifically, the author draws attention to the structural schema involving a nominal phrase as the predicative complement which is shared not only by all the subtypes of the shi-de construction, but also by the simple copular construction whose predicative complement is a noun or noun phrase. Taking this structural commonality as the point of departure, the author proposes a conceptual and semantic network in which the simple copular construction is the prototype that motivates the various subtypes of the shi-de construction structurally, semantically and in terms of information structure. Context, too, is taken into account in the interpretation of the subtypes. The revelation of the conceptual basis and cognitive economy inherent in the conceptualist model of a semantic network may hopefully contribute to increased efficiency in the acquisition of the linguistic structure in question., CHUN - Chinesischunterricht, Bd. 23 (2008): CHUN - Chinesischunterricht

This paper is concerned with the concept of discourse dramaticity in terms of subjectivity and emotionality inherent in the use of the Chinese ba-construction as developed by Jing-Schmidt (2005). The author referred to selective attention as the cognitive mechanism underlying the meaning of dramaticity. Based on the psychological principle of negativity bias which is a specific representation of selective attention, the author hypothesized that since language is an integral part of cognition, the use of the ba-construction should reflect this bias if it indeed is a device of construing subjectively and emotionally relevant events. Frequency counts conducted on authentic corpus-based data confirmed that significantly more negative events than positive or neutral events are depicted by using the ba-construction, thus validating the notion of dramaticity including subjectivity and emotionality as central to the semantics and pragmatics of the ba-construction., CHUN - Chinesischunterricht, Bd. 22 (2007): CHUN - Chinesischunterricht

This article examines Chinese manual motor metaphors involving manual object manipulation as the source domain. Specifically, we use corpus data to investigate two transitive constructions [抓紧zhuājĭn ‘grab tightly, clutch’ NP] and [把住 băzhù ‘grasp firmly’ NP] and a causative construction [把bă NP捧pĕng COMPL] ‘lift NP with deliberation’ where the referent of the NP does not lend itself to manual manipulation in the literal sense and must be interpreted as metaphoric in the unity of semantic domains. Results from both quantitative and qualitative analyses show that the two transitive grasping actions are systematically used to abstract actions requiring a keen sense of urgency and/or importance and that the causative action of lifting systematically conceptualizes over-promotion of an undeserving entity. The findings point to the bodily origin of social cognition and the embodiment of conceptualization.

This article examines Chinese manual motor metaphors involving manual object manipulation as the source domain. Specifically, we use corpus data to investigate two transitive constructions, [抓紧 zhuājǐn ‘grab tightly, clutch’ NP] and [把住 bǎzhù ‘grasp firmly’ np], and a causative construction, [把 bǎ NP 捧 pěng COMPL] ‘lift np with deliberation’, where the referent of the np does not lend itself to manual manipulation in the literal sense and must be interpreted as metaphoric in the unity of semantic domains. Results from both quantitative and qualitative analyses show that the two transitive grasping actions are systematically used to abstract actions requiring a keen sense of urgency and/or importance, and that the causative action of lifting systematically conceptualises over-promotion of an undeserving entity. The findings point to the bodily origin of social cognition and the embodiment of conceptualisation., Sinica venetiana