Abstract:Corpus data belie the allegedly negative semantic prosody of the new Chinese "
beiX" construction.The new construction is instead mainly used for negation in the speech-act domain and irony in the epistemic domain.The production and interpretation of the new "
beiX" constructs are not solely dependent upon real-time analogy with
bei-passives.Rather, they result from coercion effected by the source construct on the
beiX snowclone.
beiX
-irrealisand
beiX
-nonvolitionalare two emergent subschemas of the constructionalization of the new "
beiX" construction, which constitute a continuum with the canonical
bei-passive construction.A close examination of the semantic extension of the new "
beiX" construction shows that the "lexical coercion" hypothesis is theoretically inadequate and the constructional "Override Principle" is therefore to be maintained.