The development of the Chinese VdeO cleft construction

Abstract

AbstractThis paper addresses the development of the Chinese VdeO cleft construction, and how the cleft constructional network was developed in the history of Chinese. It is argued that VdeO clefts emerged in the 13th century which was about 300 years later than VPdeclefts. A key factor in their development is the use in Middle Chinese of relative clause in post-copula position. We argue that the emergence of VdeO clefts also involved analogization to the extant VPdeclefts as well as deferred equatives. Once VdeO clefts occurred, they were recruited into the cleft network as a subschema, resulting in the schematic network being augmented and expanded. This study is a contribution to the developing field of constructionalization by making more explicit the way how nodes are created in a constructional network and how the network is reorganized and expanded.