This study considers the potential Verb-Complement construction ‘X+buqi (不起)’ in Modern Chinese as a single construction and classifies the detailed construction meaning of ‘X+buqi (不起)’. In addition, the type frequency and token frequency of ‘X’ were derived from the corpus collection. In particular, we will focus on ‘shangbuqi (伤不起)’, which is used with high frequency in the corpus conversational domain, and examine the direction in which the new word ‘shangbuqi (伤不起)’ will develop.
This study examines the construction meaning of ‘X+buqi (不起)’ by dividing it into ‘impossible to handle’, ‘impossible to recognize’, and ‘idiom expression’. The ‘X+buqi (不起)’ construction most often expresses the meaning of ‘impossible to handle’, and expresses the objective negation the speaker may have over the condition or ability of the subject of the action realization (including the speaker). When expressing the meaning of ‘impossible to recognize’, a psychological verb related to cognition is used, and in the ‘X+buqi (不起)’ construction, it mainly expresses the inability to think or remember. Lastly, in cases where it is used as an idiom expression, it often goes beyond the meaning of the verb ‘X’. These idiom expressions have strong subjectivity and can form sentences on their own.
According to the corpus frequency analysis of ‘X+buqi (不起)’, the verb that appeared most frequently in the conversational domain was ‘伤’. ‘Shangbuqi (伤不起)’ is a new buzzword mainly used in spoken language, expressing negative emotions such as ‘dissatisfaction, frustration, distress, resentment, and hopelessness’. This study considers shangbuqi (伤不起)’ to be undergoing constructional change based on ‘X+buqi (不起)’. Specifically, ‘shangbuqi (伤不起)’ is in the ‘PostCxzn CCs’ stage.
‘V buqi (不起)’ usually directly accompanies binyu (宾语). However, the ‘shangbuqi (伤不起)’ construction does not accompanies binyu (宾语), which is the most obvious difference from the ‘V buqi (不起)’ construction. In addition, the construction ‘shangbuqi (伤不起)’ can be modified by adverbs such as ‘zhen (真)’ and ‘hen (很)’, and the entire construction shows adjectival properties rather than verbal properties. This study believes that if it becomes more popularized by more users in the future, the emerging buzzword ‘shangbuqi (伤不起)’ will eventually evolve into an idiomatic expression such as ‘liaobuqi (了不起)’.