Analysis of “New Construction with ‘Bei’” via Lexical Coercion：A Research on “Bei Ziyuan” in Cognitive Construction Grammar

A new expression like “Bei Ziyuan（be volunteered）”, frequently used in Chinese journalism and netspeak recently, not only reflects the covariance of language and society, but actually demonstrates the way how people understand the society and recategorize the world.This expression is a type of “New BeiConstruction” which has been created as a result of lexical coercion in the process of conceptualization.Its appearance proves that the overemphasis of constructional coercion in Cognitive Construction Grammar (CCxG) is biased, which could be complemented by lexical coercion, thus the interaction between lexicon and construction being really feasible.This paper will follow the usual practice of CCxG to analyze this new construction’s properties from semantic, syntactic and pragmatic perspectives.