Abstract
The new ‘XX Zi’ construction is influenced by the transmission of fan culture in Europe, America, Japan and Korea, and becomes popular under the effect of strong online catchwords, the influence of social culture and the help of new media. Through the retrieval and analysis of network corpus, combined with the method of questionnaire survey, this paper analyzes the structural features, grammaticalization process, and construction coercion mechanism of the popular online constructions ‘XX Zi’ (such as ‘Xin Xin Zi (欣欣子)’, ‘Wuyu Zi (无语子)’, ‘Bucuo Zi (不错子)’, etc.), and discusses its formation motivation, popular mechanism and pragmatic function from the cognitive perspective. This paper holds that the redundancy of the construction itself and its semantic, phonetic and syntactic features are all the manifestations of its grammaticalization. It meets the communicative needs of young people in specific contexts, adapts to their expression needs of ‘defamiliarization’ and ‘subjectivization’, and conforms to the cognitive law of people’s pursuit of highlighting the theme meaning.
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- 1.
Website address: https://weibo.com/.
- 2.
Website address: https://www.zhihu.com/.
- 3.
Website address: https://www.douban.com/.
- 4.
Website address: https://tieba.baidu.com/index.html.
- 5.
There are two pronunciations of ‘Zi’ in Chinese, one is pronounced as the third tone (zǐ), and the other is pronounced as a neutral tone (zi).
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Li, C. (2022). An Analysis of the Grammaticalization, Coercion Mechanisms and Formation Motivation of the New Construction ‘XX Zi’ from the Cognitive Perspective. In: Dong, M., Gu, Y., Hong, JF. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13249. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06703-7_13
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