The present paper attempts to provide a holistic investigation of a prevailing "solecism" in modem Chinese (i.e., expressions
such as 很学术 hen xueshu "very academy" and 非常中国 feichang zhongguo "very China") by means of a tripartite model of analysis. It consists of six parts, which can be further specified as: 1) Introduction; 2) Usage distribution; 3) Semantic cognition; 4) Syntactic analysis; 5) Social motivation, and 6) Conclusion. First of all, the introduction part provides a brief state-of-the-art type of discussion of the" Gradable Intensifier + Nongradable Nominal Adjective Construction," while the necessity to examine the issue from an
interdisciplinary perspective, namely in relation to cognitive science, theoretical grammar, and sociolinguistics, is emphasized as well. The second part discusses the genre and stylistic features of this structure and its distribution in language use. The third part focuses on the illustration and explanation of the clashes produced by the contrast between the semantics of this innovative usage and the cognitive knowledge of the speaker for a full interpretation of its descriptive content and structural environment. Following this line of argumentation, the next part makes some detailed analyses of the construction by adopting the theoretic framework suggested in the Minimalist Program (MP). The results of these analyses reveal some explanatory and analytical merits possessed by MP in the treatment of the issue in question. The fifth part is designed to provide some sociolinguistic explanations for the wide spread of this "solecism" in modern Chinese, arguing that the contradiction between the violation of the grammatical rule and the acceptability of the innovative usage could never be satisfactorily settled down if the issue was not examined in a macro-
sociolinguistic context as has been given in the present study. By introducing some cross-cultural evidence related to the construction, the paper concludes in the sixth part that a deeper understanding of the mechanisms governing the popularity of this usage depends on more meaningful interdisciplinary research in the days to come. A call is also made for the establishment of a more interactive and creative research paradigm in the study of language science.