This article examines metaphor choice in China's official anti-corruption discourse. Drawing on corpus data, we analyze the metaphors used by the Chinese Communist Party and its flagship newspaper, the People' s Daily, to frame the anti-corruption campaign and influence public perception. It is found that both embodied experience and cultural models are recruited as the metaphoric vehicles or source domains for the strategic profiling of different aspects of corruption and anticorruption actions as the target domain. Additionally, metaphor choice is systematically different in the Chinese and the English versions of the party newspaper, reflecting that metaphor use is sensitive to sociocultural context, especially to the knowledge base within an epistemic community.

This article describes emerging misogynistic labels involving the morpheme biăo ‘slut’ as a gendered personal suffix in the Chinese cyber lexicon. We analyze the morphological, semantic, and cognitive processes behind their coinage, and the way they are used across gender lines in Chinese social media as a community of discourse practice. Our findings show that women participate in female pejoration as much as men do, and that men are more inclined than women to use pejorative labels that specifically attack female empowerment. Additionally, men construct masculinity and power by using certain misogynistic labels as generics. We argue that verbal misogyny is part and parcel of a larger gender ideology by illuminating the mutual constitution of the linguistic pejoration of women and the gender order in postreform China. This study has implications for research on women's conditions in contemporary China, raises awareness of gender inequality, and lays the groundwork for social actions toward gender equality. (Gender, sexism, neologism, social media, Chinese)*

This study investigates the diachronic development of Chinese disjunction, drawing implications both for principles of diachronic Construction Grammar, and for the linguistic typology of disjunction. Close examinations of data from historical corpora revealed non-linear, gradual constructional changes based on complex yet principled interactions of conceptual origin, constructional patterning, discourse pragmatics, and an isolating typology in the development of Chinese disjunction. Specifically, the results (1) show that construction is the source, unit and product of change, (2) demonstrate the pivotal role of syntactic and semantic reanalysis in the micro changes leading to the constructionalization of disjunction, (3) reveal a conceptual and diachronic continuity between epistemic uncertainty and disjunction, (4) highlight frequency of use as a driving force in the conventionalization and entrenchment of constructional schema, and (5) confirm the role played by an isolating typology in syntactic and categorial reassignment as a key step in grammatical constructionalization.

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This analysis aims at establishing the discourse construction as a theoretical construct within the framework of Construction Grammar. Linguistic constructions theoretically exist at different levels of analysis, but linguistic analyses at the level of discourse are few and far apart. This analysis showcases a study of a discourse construction that contains the internet neologism yě-shì-zuì-le. This discourse construction emerges from the Chinese cyberspace and develops complex meaning and function. I illustrate how the construct of discourse construction allows for an in-depth explanation its use and development. Also, the analysis of this construction demonstrates the necessity to redefine and broaden the consideration of ‘context’ when the idea of a discourse construction is introduced.