Subjektivität, Emotionalität und die chinesische ba-Konstruktion

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the concept of discourse dramaticity in terms of subjectivity and emotionality inherent in the use of the Chinese ba-construction as developed by Jing-Schmidt (2005). The author referred to selective attention as the cognitive mechanism underlying the meaning of dramaticity. Based on the psychological principle of negativity bias which is a specific representation of selective attention, the author hypothesized that since language is an integral part of cognition, the use of the ba-construction should reflect this bias if it indeed is a device of construing subjectively and emotionally relevant events. Frequency counts conducted on authentic corpus-based data confirmed that significantly more negative events than positive or neutral events are depicted by using the ba-construction, thus validating the notion of dramaticity including subjectivity and emotionality as central to the semantics and pragmatics of the ba-construction.