A functional approach to two ‘focussing’ constructions in English and Chinese

Abstract

This paper analyses the enhanced theme construction and the object-as-role-in-event construction (respectively known as ‘ it-cleft’ and ‘WH-cleft’ in formal grammars) in English and their equivalent constructions in Chinese, using the Cardiff model of Systemic Functional Grammar. The analysis proposed here is significantly different from other approaches in many ways. One of the important point is that we assign Participant Roles such as Attribute, Carrier to the participants in the process existing in the construction. In this way our approach is inherently functional and semantically-motivated. We regard the copula verb be (in English) or shi (in Chinese) as the Main Verb of the relational process which fills the sentence. Our analysis shows that a functionally-oriented and semantically-motivated approach to the focussing constructions is more insightful in understanding the discourse function of these constructions than structure-based studies.