Grammatical Surprise:On the Cognitive-affective Mechanism of Linguistic Dramaticity
In everyday communication,dramatized language represents striking events and expresses intense emotions.Since the introduction of the concept of"dramatized discourse",research on drama and dramaticity in the Chinese language has advanced significantly.Scholars have not only identified and analyzed various lexical grammatical devices of linguistic dramaticity in Chinese,but have also uncovered and explained a unique isomorphic connection between theatrical forms in traditional Chinese performing art and grammatical structures used to depict dramatic events.These novel insights have expanded the theoretical scope of research on linguistic subjectivity and prompted new inquiries into dramatized language as a theoretical construct.This article delves deeper into the cognitive-affective mechanisms of linguistic dramaticity.We introduce the concept of"grammatical surprise",which refers to the experience of surprise resulting from the creative and often intentional violation of linguistic conventions within a language community.These conventions encompass grammatical rules,co-occurrence norms,pragmatic habits,and more.The concept of grammatical surprise draws from the psychology of surprise,a basic emotion arising from"prediction error"in information processing whereby incoming information clashes with our established cognitive schemas that shape our expectations and assumptions about the world.Linguistic conventions are integral to our cognitive schemas,governing our linguistic behavior and establishing expectations for how we process others'linguistic behavior.Unexpected encounters with rule-violating expressions in language use prompt processing errors and take us by surprise.We argue that grammatical surprise forms the experiential and embodied foundation of linguistic dramaticity and dramatization.Grammatical surprise enhances our understanding of linguistic dramaticity in terms of cognitive salience and emotive expressiveness-two previously articulated features of linguistic dramaticity.Using examples from Chinese,English,and German,we demonstrate that in Chinese,and to some extent in English as well,grammatical constructions crystalized as devices of dramaticity through grammatical surprise exploit the typological characteristic of the grammar not being strictly bound by morphosyntactic constraints.To be specific,linguistic dramaticity is achieved by pushing the limits of local syntactic rules and collocational conventions.By contrast,German,a language with limited morphosyntactic flexibility,prioritizes syntactic transparency over grammatical surprise and is less tolerant of its occurrence.The article also discusses diachronic aspects of linguistic dramaticity as seen in the conventionalization of grammatical surprise and concludes with suggestions of future directions.