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

Corpus data belie the allegedly negative semantic prosody of the new Chinese "bei X" 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 "bei X" constructs are not solely dependent upon real-time analogy with bei-passives.Rather, they result from coercion effected by the source construct on thebei X snowclone.bei X_-irrealis andbei X_{-nonvolitional} are two emergent subschemas of the constructionalization of the new "bei X" construction, which constitute a continuum with the canonical bei-passive construction.A close examination of the semantic extension of the new "bei X" construction shows that the "lexical coercion" hypothesis is theoretically inadequate and the constructional "Override Principle" is therefore to be maintained.