Mandarin Chinese 是……的 shì…de construction as an example of a cleft structure

Sebastian Wielosz

Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie


Abstract

Cleft sentences appear in a lot of languages, no matter which language group or family
they represent, yet they might have different syntactic and semantic properties due to
the typological variety of world’s languages. The majority of articles and monographs on
this topic have been written to recount a certain grammatical relation in English, as this
is the language in which the term cleft sentence was coined. Linguists noticed years ago
that similar structures exist in other languages. Among them there is Mandarin Chinese,
which has a structure that meets all the requirements for a frame structure. Yet linguists
do not often see the resemblance between the是……的 shì...de construction and analogical
sentence structures in other languages and do not attribute the name cleft sentence to it.
The main purpose of this paper is to elaborately present what cleft structures are, as well
as to prove that the 是……的shì...de structure is in fact this type of sentence. The first part is supposed to provide general information concerning cleft structures in a natural
language. The second part is a presentation of most important issues related to the cleft
structure in Mandarin Chinese.


Keywords:

frame structure, cleft sentence, emphatic structure, topic-comment sentence


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Published
2021-12-10

Cited by

Wielosz, S. . (2021). Mandarin Chinese 是……的 shì…de construction as an example of a cleft structure. Prace Językoznawcze, 23(4), 249–262. https://doi.org/10.31648/pj.7045

Sebastian Wielosz 
Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie