A copula analysis of shi in the Chinese cleft construction

Abstract

This paper, based on a cross-linguistic understanding of the concepts of "copula" and "cleft", demonstrates that the Standard Modern Chinese shì is an invariant non-inflectional verb typically co-occurring with NPs whereby they together form the predicate of a copular sentence. According to Construction Grammar (theorized by Goldberg 1995, 2006. Croft 2001, 2005, etc.), a copular construction can be understood as a form and meaning pair that entails a proposition with the nominal semantics of specificational and predicational (Blom & Daalder 1977, Declerck 1988. Patten 2010, Zhan 2012). Furthermore, a constructional schematic taxonomy is proposed for the prototypical Chinese copular construction, under which the cleft construction is a subschema of the specificational copular construction. The Chinese cleft [NP COP NOM] denotes the specificational meaning (the NP and the nominalization representing a referential member and a non- referential but restricted set forming a member-class relationship) plus a contrastive focus. Finally, the cleft construction is treated to have two subschemas: cleft-sbj and cleft-obj. In a cleft-sbj sentence, the sentential subject is co-referential with the subject in the embedded nominalization, and the presence of the nominalizer de is optional. In a cleft-obj sentence, the sentential subject is co-referential with the object in the nominalization, and the presence of the nominalizer is obligatory. It will be shown that the treatment of shì as an adverb in the cleft-sbj sentence (Teng 1979, Huang 1998, etc.) falls short in explaining why shì can co-occur with an optional de. With a copula treatment of shì, the presence of de as a nominalizer logically follows from a specificational [NP COP NOM] analysis. Therefore, the Chinese cleft construction basically functions to signal, instead of a transitory process that an adverbial hypothesis implies, a non-transitory state or situation.