“What a ‘Zéi-Licious’ Meal”!—A Cultural-Pragmatic Account of Chinese Positive Irony

This work is the very first to investigate an emergent Mandarin positive ironic construction involving the lexical marker zéi (meaning thief, traitor, robber, etc.), viz., [zéi + positive terms] ([zéi-POS]), where zéi serves as an extreme degree modifier (EDM). It seeks to formulate a cultural-pragmatic account of the phenomenon based on the cultural-pragmatic schema posited by (Sharifian, F. (2016). Cultural pragmatic schemas, pragmemes, and practs: A cultural linguistics perspective. In K. Allen, A. Capone & I. Kecskes (Eds.), Pragmemes and theories of language use (pp. 505–519). Springer.). First, I adopt a constructionist approach (notably, Radical Construction Grammar) to investigate the form-meaning pairings of [zèi-POS] to give a general description of the construction in terms of the syntax and semantics of zéi, both of which indeed are found to feature various aspects of ‘culture’ with diachronic evidence. Second, I provide a culture-for-pragmatics explanation for the use of [zéi-POS] as the basis for positive irony. Last, considering that positive irony is rare (Meyers Roy, A. (1977). Towards a definition of irony. In R. W. Fasold & R. Shuy (Eds.), Studies in language variation. Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press.) and harder to process (Attardo, Ruiz-Gurillo and Alvarado-Ortega (eds), Irony and humor: From pragmatics to discourse, John Benjamins, 2013; Giora, Discourse Processes 19:239–264, 1995) than negative irony, I use conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner, The way we think: Conceptual blending and the minds hidden complexities, Basic Books, 2002) to further elaborate on how positive irony may emerge out of a [zéi-POS] expression.