ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author looks at the type of construction also involving the copular morpheme shi and the function word de – namely, the cleft construction in Chinese – and he explores the structural properties of the Chinese clause. At the lexical level, the two morphemes shi and de in the cleft construction seem to receive an interpretation different from their counterparts in the emphatic construction. The fact that de is obligatory in the cleft construction suggests that it functions in a different fashion than it does in the emphatic construction: in the former, it is a particle effecting nominalization, while in the latter it is a sentence-final particle expressing evidentiality. The obligatoriness of shi in the cleft construction indicates that it is an indispensable syntactic constituent of the sentence and that the cleft construction is different in nature from the emphatic construction.
