ABSTRACT
This chapter explores well-known grammatical construction in Chinese, copular construction, where shi is generally considered a copular morpheme corresponding to 'be' in English. It proposes a uniform, parsing-based account of various constructions containing shi. The problem with analyzing the copular morpheme shi 'be' in Chinese is that it appears in a range of constructions which yield a variety of interpretations. The context-dependent nature of interpreting the Chinese copula strongly suggests that it has semantically underspecified content which requires to be pragmatically enriched. This point to a hypothesis that the copular morpheme is an anaphoric expression, which appears to have the characteristics of pronouns. In general, the underspecified content of a pronoun can be identified from the independent context, or cataphorically – i.e., with the semantic value of a later linguistic expression in the discourse. The context involves local as well as external linguistic content.
