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

Yao, Jun; Song, Jie; Singh, Michael

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2013.06.003

Cited by 13 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…On the other hand, since irony engages numerous social-cognitive processes, we posit that such extensive cross-cultural comparisons could yield novel and important insights. For example, different national cultures may differ in the typically observed patterns of irony use and understanding, or may recognize and use forms that are different from, yet related to, verbal irony (e.g., Okamoto, 2002Okamoto, , 2006Okamoto, , 2007Yao et al, 2013). Alternatively, the same factor (e.g., self-esteem) could have a different impact on irony use and understanding in different national cultures, or the relationship between a given individual and national cultural factor may differ between national contexts 1 .…”

Section: It Emphasizes Quantitative Measurement and Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Barta (2013) has also suggested that a history of totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe has contributed to a greater preference for indirect, nonliteral speech as a way to communicate with a lesser risk of repercussions. Yao et al (2013) and Blasko et al (2021) raise a similar point with regard to the function of irony in China, especially when commenting www.rcommunicationr.org cultural variation is overestimated in lay description" (493).…”

Section: National Cultural Norms Of Communication and Ironymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, Yao et al (2013) have described the creation of ironic meaning in Chinese via the passive marker bei (e.g., "being forced to actively take part"). The authors carried out a qualitative analysis of 140 ironic sentences using the bei marker and identified three contexts of irony which are more specific for Chinese culture.…”

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Socio-cultural and individual factors in verbal irony use and understanding: What we know, what we don’t know, what we want to know

Banasik-Jemielniak

Kałowski

2022

rev commun res

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AA significant part of everyday verbal communication consists of nonliteral language, including irony (Gibbs 2000). Efficient irony use can serve a wide range of pragmatic goals, while deficits in irony comprehension can have negative social consequences. Whereas a large body of psycholinguistic research has been produced on irony use and understanding by adults, little attention has been paid to the socio-cultural characteristics of this phenomenon so far. Some individual factors that have been identified as correlates of irony use include personality of the speaker, gender, age, or speaking a second language. In this article, we argue that it is necessary to bring the aspects of socio-cultural variables and individual characteristics together in the further study of irony across national cultures. To this end, we present a narrative review of theoretical and quantitative empirical literature from the field of psycholinguistics on both national cultural and individual/psychological factors impacting the use and understanding of verbal irony in communication. Based on the review, we suggest a theoretical model that could guide future quantitative studies on irony use such that both contextual factors (including national cultural dimensions) and individual differences between the speakers are clearly defined and related to one another in terms of their influence.

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Section: It Emphasizes Quantitative Measurement and Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: National Cultural Norms Of Communication and Ironymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Socio-cultural and individual factors in verbal irony use and understanding: What we know, what we don’t know, what we want to know

Banasik-Jemielniak

Kałowski

2022

rev commun res

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“…Since construction is a form-meaning correspondence, including morphemes, idioms, and words which are partially filled lexis and fully general linguistic patterns (Goldberg, 1995(Goldberg, , 1996(Goldberg, , 2006(Goldberg, , 2019, most studies on the Mandarin innovative Bei construction focus on its novel properties, as many researchers have demonstrated that this construction is unique in its syntactic and semantic-pragmatic features. For example, the Mandarin innovative Bei construction is considered as an indirect passive structure (Yao et al, 2013), a double violation of form and meaning (Shi, 2013), a light verb structure (Huang and Liu, 2014), and a non-autonomous syntactic structure with semantic changes (Ye, 2019). More importantly, studies compare the innovative Bei construction with the canonical passive structure in order to examine its properties.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Studies reveal that in terms of syntactic structure, the innovative Bei construction is more flexible than the canonical passive structure in that the parts of speech of the lexical item “X” following “ Bei ” can be adjectives, nouns, intransitive verbs as well as transitive verbs ( Wang, 2011 ; Chen, 2017 ; Chen and Hu, 2020 ). In terms of semantics, the innovative Bei construction expresses various meanings including humor ( Yao et al, 2013 ), mocking ( Wang, 2019 ), sarcasm, and criticism ( Wang, 2011 ; Yao and Song, 2012 ; Wang, 2019 ). Among all these associations, one of the most significant aspects is its negative, undesirable, and even detrimental meanings of the subject’s participation in the event X, while the canonical passive structure conveys all positive, neutral, and negative meanings ( Chen, 2017 ; Ye, 2019 ; Chen and Hu, 2020 , p. 96).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The facilitation of constructional meaning in the processing of Mandarin innovative Bei construction

Liao

Weng²,

Dong³

et al. 2023

Front. Psychol.

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The processing of Mandarin innovative Bei construction in the form of “Bei + X” is different from that of the traditional Bei construction in that the former activates the constructional meaning which is intrinsically negative. This study thus investigates whether the processing of Mandarin innovative Bei construction is facilitated by the access of such emergent negative associations in a self-paced reading experiment with a priming paradigm. In this study, participants firstly read lexical primes in three conditions including construction-related phrases (i.e. phrases expressing the negative constructional meaning of the innovative Bei construction), component-related phrases (i.e. phrases expressing the partial literal meaning of the innovative Bei construction), and unrelated phrases (i.e. phrases expressing unrelated meaning to the innovative Bei construction). They then read sentences where the innovative Bei construction was fitted into and finally answered questions. Results showed that the lexical primes conveying the constructional meaning of the innovative Bei construction significantly shortened participants’ reading time duration as compared with another two priming conditions. To conclude, the processing of Mandarin innovative Bei construction is facilitated by the priming of its constructional meaning, which provides some psychological evidence for the construction-based processing of Mandarin innovative Bei construction.

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