“BeiX” Snowclones in Speech-Act/Epistemic Domains and Constructional Coercion

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 _{-nonvolitional}are 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.