Abstract
ABSTRACT ON CHINESE FOCUS AND CLEFT CONSTRUCTIONS Hui-chi Lee, Ph. D. Graduate Institute of Linguistics National Tsing Hua University, 2005 Professor Wei-tien Dylan Tsai, Advisor There is plenty of previous research focusing on Chinese cleft construction. The previous researchers pay attention to different issues for analyzing Chinese cleft construction. Teng (1979), Li (1980), Tang (1983), Ross (1983), Huang (1988), Chiu (1993), Tsao (1994) make great effort to explore Chinese cleft sentences. However, among the previous research, the internal structure of the cleft construction is little explored. In this dissertation, depending on different types of focused elements, cleft sentences are divided into three focus patterns: subject focus, adjunct focus and predicate focus. One of the contributions of this dissertation is to distinguish the subject/adjunct-focus from the predicate-focus structures. The discrepancies between the subject/adjunct-focus sentences and the predicate-focus sentences are fairly obvious, but which has been inadequately discussed in the past, and has therefore led to great confusion. The main discussions of this dissertation focus on four topics: (i) the nature of Chinese cleft construction, (ii) discussion of sentence final de, (iii) discussion of the focus marker shi, and (iv) the syntax of the cleft construction. Firstly, the distribution of shi and de’s co-occurrence is displayed and two subgroups are divided according to the possibility of the omission of de. Pattern A is assumed to be sentences with headless relative clauses with the configuration ‘shi…*(de)’; Pattern B is assumed to be cleft sentences with the configuration ‘shi…(de)’. Moreover, the alternation of the cleft form [V de O] is discussed and four tendencies of the postverbal de are demonstrated. The properties of postverbal de are summed up as the following four tendencies: (1) highly frequent past time association; (2) VP compound tendency; (3) indefiniteness tendency of the object; and (4) simplicity tendency of the object. The subject-focus and adjunct-focus structures are argued to be distinct from a predicate-focus structure by eight pieces of syntactic and semantic evidence. The eight pieces of evidence include the co-occurrence with de, various focus scope, the alternative of postverbal de, and support by cross-linguistic evidence, etc. Furthermore, the predicate-focus structure in the shi…de configuration is distinguished into sentences with headless relative clauses and sentences with focus are distinguished. In addition, it is assumed that predicate types (stative vs. dynamic) influence the grammaticality and the interpretations of predicate-focus sentences. Moreover, it is found that the word order of shi and modals varies depending on different types of modals. Lastly, shi is divided into two groups according to the focus scope. When shi occurs in the subject/adjunct-focus structures, the focus scope of shi is limited to the immediate constituent following shi. According to the constrained focus scope, the two focus structures are parallel to English cleft construction. When shi occurs in the predicate-focus structure, the focus scope of shi varies. Shi can focus on the verb, or the object, or the truth value of the proposition. The variety of focused constituents can be analogous to another focus marker, zhi ‘only’. Finally, the syntactic structures of the cleft constructions are discussed cross-linguistically. The analysis of the specific maximal projection (FP) is employed.