ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to investigate the syntactic and categorial status of the element de found in clause-final position in Mandarin Chinese cleft-type sentences such as (1), and also attempts to account for the alternation found where the object optionally appears positioned after de as in (2):
wo shi zuotian mai piao de.
I Be yesterday buy ticket De
‘It was yesterday that I bought the ticket.’
wo shi zuotian mai de piao.
I Be yesterday buy De ticket
‘It was yesterday that I bought the ticket.’
Structures such as (1) have been the subject of a number of pieces of research in recent years, e.g., Chiu (1993), Huang (1982), D. shi (1994) among many others. There and elsewhere it is noted that shi-de sentences consistently give rise to interpretations similar to English clefts, with the focused element commonly following the copula shi and frequently being an adverb or PP referring to the time or place where some event has occurred, as for example in (3): 1(3) ta shi zai Zhongguo xue Yingwen de.
he Be in China study English De
‘It was in China that he studied English.’
Most research on the shi-de construction has centered itself on the focus properties of such sentences and has attempted to offer accounts of how the focus interpretation may be syntactically encoded. In general this has led to a concentration on the function of shi and various suggestions that LF movement of the focus may be involved. 2 Comparatively little attention has however been given to the role and status of the element de in the construction, possibly due to the fact that de may sometimes seem to be optional in its occurrence, and to date there has not been any serious discussion of the alternation illustrated in (1) and (2). Such apparently optional occurrence of the object either before or after de is puzzling as there is no obvious interpretative difference triggering the alternation and purely optional, unmotivated movement should not occur under current Minimalist assumptions. This chapter suggests that a study of the role played by de and the alternation found in examples such as (1) and (2) leads to a better understanding of the shi-de construction and the interesting conclusion that de is currently undergoing a significant reanalysis. It is argued that de is changing category from an original source as a D0 element to become a new past tense instantiation of T0, and that the reason for such a shift is in large part the increase of a past time conversational implicature strongly present in shi-de forms. Syntactically, such D-to-T conversion is suggested to be an example of ‘lateral grammaticalization’, a process in which a functional head from one type of syntactic domain may under appropriate circumstances undergo re-interpretation as an equivalent functional head in a second domain, D and T here both being elements which (potentially) assign deictic reference to their complements and therefore having largely corresponding functions in the nominal and clausal domains. The chapter also presents a variety of evidence suggesting that de is actually still ambiguous at present and in different instances may potentially instantiate either tense or a D0 head, this having direct effects on a number of syntactic phenomena. Speakers are therefore argued to significantly maintain a dual analysis of de in the current period of change, with different underlying structures being possible depending on the temporal interpretation of de in shi-de sentences.