Heidi Hui Shi

University of Turku | UTU · School of Language and Translation Studies

Despite extensive research efforts to explain the Mandarin Chinese particle le , confusion persists in the absence of a unitary theory and sufficient empirical evidence. This study provides a unitary account of le by adopting a usage-based constructionist approach, one that liberates grammatical aspect from, and is able to accommodate, lexical aspe...

2021. Affective stance in constructional idioms: A usage-based constructionist approach to Mandarin [yòu X yòu Y], Journal of Pragmatics 177, 29-50. The Mandarin Chinese [yòu X yòu Y] is a semi-formulaic construction with two open slots X and Y, which admit a range of lexical input. Existing studies of this constructional idiom are incomplete due t...

This article examines Chinese manual motor metaphors involving manual object manipulation as the source domain. Specifically, we use corpus data to investigate two transitive constructions, [抓紧 zhuājĭn 'grab tightly, clutch' NP] and [把住 băzhù 'grasp firmly' NP], and a causative construction [把 bă NP 捧 pĕng COMPL] 'lift NP with deliberation'. In eac...

This study investigates emerging usages in Chinese cyberspace of the numeral classifier méi that violate syntactic and semantic conventions of canonical grammar of modern Chinese. We treat these usages as constructional variants of the canonical classifier construction and show how they afford users of Weibo a device of social indexicality in the s...

This study investigates emerging usages in Chinese cyberspace of the numeral classifier méi that violate syntactic and semantic conventions of canonical grammar of modern Chinese. We treat these usages as constructional variants of the canonical classifier construction and show how they afford users of Weibo a device of social indexicality in the s...