Focus Constructions Involving <i>shì</i> in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that shì ‘be’… (de) focus sentences in Mandarin Chinese are not structurally uniform. One of the criteria to make distinctions among them is the Adjacency Condition, that is, only the right adjacent element of shì can be focused. The debate has been centered on the question of why this restriction only holds in certain types of sentences involving focus but not in all of them. We argue that the so-called Adjacency Condition is not a primary condition that regulates the distribution of different types of foci; instead, the presence or the absence of adjacency-like restriction precisely indicates the existence of two different syntactic structures involving foci: one gives rise to the adjacency effects, whereas the other one does not. Importantly, our central proposal is that any constituent that falls under the c-command domain of shì will have a chance to get a focus reading if prosodically prominent, which naturally holds for the constituents that are not adjacent to shì. Along this line, shì is analyzed as a focus domain indicator rather than the focus marker itself.

Keywords

• <i>shì … (de)</i> focus constructions
• adjacency condition
• exhaustivity effects
• domain marker