A cartographic analysis of Shi and Lian…Dou in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Shi and lian … dou/ye can both be used as focus constructions in Mandarin Chinese. The current paper aims to investigate the shi and lian … dou/ye constructions within the framework of Syntactic Cartography. The two constructions share very similar syntactic distributions; however, shi and lian are not in the same syntactic position, or more precisely, the former is located higher than the latter. The two constructions mark various foci, namely, adjunct focus, predicate focus, subject focus, and complement focus. In terms of the focus meaning, they express foci of different types, namely, shi introduces the exclusive focus and lian signals the inclusive focus, which is retained in their lexical meanings during the process of grammaticalization of the two words. Both shi and lian can occur at the sentence-initial position and the sentence-internal position. The current research agrees with the previous studies that the sentence-initial lian-XP serves as topics while the sentence-internal lian-XP functions as foci. This paper claims that the sentence-initial shi-phrase also expresses topics and further argues that the sentence-initial shi-phrase marks topic foci whereas the sentence-initial lian-phrase marks focus topics which both carry the [Topic] and [Focus] features but differ in the feature strength. It is concluded that shi can be analyzed on a par with lian in Mandarin Chinese.