An Embodied-Cognitive Sociolinguistic Account of Viral Online Greeting Construction
Toward the end of 2020,a novel online greeting construction,instantiated by "Good morning,Laborers!" went viral on Weibo or WeChat Moments of the young netizen group.Despite its superficial form of greeting,this construction serves both self-and in-group banter functions.As its syntactic and semantic features cannot be indicated from its components or from existing linguistic structures,it can only be stored as a construction in the speakers' mental grammar.Classic construction grammar research has extensively explored grammatical constructions;however,emphasis on the constructional variations used by specific social groups is lacking,and the social information stored in these constructions has seldom been addressed.Drawing on insights from Embodied Cognitive Sociolinguistics (ECS),this paper begins by refining the embodied principles of linguistic structures from a socioecological perspective,encompassing the self in action,the audience in the virtual friends' circle,and prevailing societal events.Subsequently,based on these principles,it systematically describes the constructional information stored in viral online greeting construction and explores the factors that contribute to its popularity and productivity.This study found that online viral construction mainly serves the purpose of temporarily constructing the speaker's social identity.Its meaning-making mechanism can be attributed to four embodied-cognitive operations:the generic metaphor of split "subject-self",scenario metonymy,the contrast of virtual-real situations,and the construal of audience roles.It also claims that ECS aligns with the foundational principles of the third wave of language variation research in terms of its theoretical underpins and research goals.
embodied-cognitive sociolinguisticsconstructional variationsocial meaning of constructionidentity constructionembodied cognitive mechanism
万方数据
维普
