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This paper studies the extension of conventional meanings of Chinese FACE expressions in their collocations as well as the collocations themselves through metonymy and metaphor. The data with five FACE expressions included are sampled from the corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics at Peking University. The conventional meaning of these five FACE expressions is ‘the surface of the front of the head from the top of the forehead to the base of the chin and from ear to ear’. The conventional meaning of FACE in its collocations is metonymically extended to ‘facial expression, emotion, attitude, person, health state, affection, sense of honor, etc.’, and metaphorically to ‘the front space or part of something, a part, a side or an aspect of something, the surface or the exposed layer of something, the geometric plane in math or scope/range of something, etc.’. When Chinese FACE is collocated with other words, its meanings are also extended through metonymy-metonymy chains, metonymy-metaphor continuums and metonymy-metaphor combinations. The meanings of Chinese FACE collocations (phrases) are mainly metonymically extended when used in certain contexts.

COVID-19 poses a threat to social stability globally, which requires efficacious governance and public cooperation. To handle the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese national news media have mobilized the public to identify and collaborate with the nation. This paper investigates how war, chess, and examination metaphors, nation personification, and metonymies (i.e. the part representing the whole) are utilized in news reports and editorials to achieve the purpose. We adhere to the theoretical framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis and analyze 156 articles that are sourced from Xinhua News Agency and People’s Daily from January 22, 2020 to February 13, 2020. Besides demonstrating the specific entailments of these metaphors and metonymies, we also involve scenarios such as the ‘Heroic Fight’ scenario and the ‘Harmonious Family’ scenario. Those framing devices function to evoke patriotism and reinforce national identity by activating collective, historical, and cultural memories and evaluating in-group members positively.

This paper aims to investigate the meanings of Chinese neng (modal verb) bu (negative word) neng (modal verb) + VP construction and explores the meaning motivations behind them. The present paper employs the method of collostructional analysis, R software and BLCU Corpus Center1 (BCC) are used to process the linguistic data. It is found that the prototypical meaning of the target construction is “let something (not) happen or let someone (not) do something” with the sense of negotiation and interaction and its extensional meanings include “getting an expected result”, “continuation”, “obtaining”, “specific actions containing causation, motion, communication, vision, life, and mental activities”. The meaning motivations of the construction lie in the force experience of human from his/her interaction with the outside world, and in the semantic interaction of its constituent words neng and bu.

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