Approaching the Chinese Network Catchphrase “Wǒ Kĕnéng V Le Jiă N” as a Construction

In early 2017 the Chinese construction ‘W?? K??n??ng V Le Ji?? N’ emerges as a network catchphrase, and soon it occurs quite often in everyday conversations. Its frequent occurrences in a wide range of communication arouse the authors’ interest. This network catchphrase is viewed as a form-meaning pair, i.e a construction. This paper focuses on the structure and composition of this transitive construction, and analyzes its subjectivity, productivity as well as the pragmatic meanings intended by the speakers. It is discovered that personal and subjective cognition experienced by various netizens is reflected in similar transitive constructions in dynamically changing contexts. The first-person subjects and the epistemic modality ‘K??n??ng (might)’ indicate subjective judgements and attitudes about the action or event happened. In addition, the modifier Ji?? intensifies deviation of the event from the speaker’s expectation. Therefore, the contrast signifies different pragmatic functions intended by the speakers in specific contexts.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].