The ironical Chinese bei-construction and its accessibility to English speakers

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2013.06.003

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	The ironical Chinese bei-construction and its accessibility to English speakers
	Yao, Jun 1; Song, Jie 2; Singh, Michael 3
刊名	JOURNAL OF PRAGMATICS
	2013-09
卷号	55 页码:195-209
关键词	Chinese bei-construction Irony Pragmatic marker of enunciation Semantic properties Pragmatic functions
ISSN号	0378-2166
DOI	10.1016/j.pragma.2013.06.003
英文摘要	The paper aims to explore the accessibility of the popular Chinese ironical bei-construction to English speakers. It is proposed that deviation from the prototypical or unmarked Chinese bei-passives can help to access the ironic interpretation. Through data analysis, we find that the ironical "beiXX" construction derives from the underlying structure of indirect long passives: affected entity/subject + bei + (causer) + (implicit main predicate) + explicit secondary predicate. The differences between Chinese bei-passives and English passives lie in people's "tolerance" toward the evaluative meaning of "being neutral" and degrees of "indirectness" in terms of the correlation between the causer and the affected entity. Chinese favor this bei-construction because it functions as a pragmatic marker of enunciation to instruct the readers about the subjectivity of the discourse participants and about the situational and socio-historical contexts in which it is used. The ironical bei-construction has become an accepted and recognized pattern to express disapproval and criticism in Chinese media discourse. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
WOS研究方向	Linguistics
语种	英语
出版者	ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
WOS记录号	WOS:000324011400013
内容类型	期刊论文
源URL	[http://10.2.47.112/handle/2XS4QKH4/1931]
专题	上海财经大学
通讯作者	Yao, Jun
作者单位	1.Shanghai Univ Finance & Econ, Dept Foreign Languages, Shanghai 200433, Peoples R China; 2.Shanghai Univ Sport, Dept Foreign Languages, Shanghai 200438, Peoples R China; 3.Univ Western Sydney, Ctr Educ Res, Sydney, NSW 2751, Australia
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Yao, Jun,Song, Jie,Singh, Michael. The ironical Chinese bei-construction and its accessibility to English speakers[J]. JOURNAL OF PRAGMATICS,2013,55:195-209.
APA	Yao, Jun,Song, Jie,&Singh, Michael.(2013).The ironical Chinese bei-construction and its accessibility to English speakers.JOURNAL OF PRAGMATICS,55,195-209.
MLA	Yao, Jun,et al."The ironical Chinese bei-construction and its accessibility to English speakers".JOURNAL OF PRAGMATICS 55(2013):195-209.