The focus-marking function of shi in Mandarin Chinese

The bipartite relationship between subject and predicate (syntactic relation), topic and comment (discourse function), given and new (information distribution), and between presupposition and focus (semantic relation) seem to be manifested in all human languages. The focus phenomenon is a vehicle for probing into these linguistic structures, and hence the language faculties of human brains. This dissertation examines the structural and functional characteristics of sentences containing the morpheme shi in Mandarin Chinese. It is shown that shi, which is traditionally regarded as the Chinese copula, performs a unified function in all these structures, the function of marking the semantic focus (=comment) in relation to the topic as defined in Gundel (1994, 1996). It is therefore proposed that shi is pragmatically a focus marker and syntactically an adverb (Huang 1982) that separates the focus/comment from the explicitly or implicitly expressed topic. Some implications ensue from this analysis. First, there are no (truly syntactic) copular sentences in Chinese comparable with the copular sentences in other languages. Second, the Chinese cleft sentence is seen as a shi-marked simplex sentence with a verbal predicate. It is not "cleft" in the sense that it is a complex sentence where the focus occurs before an embedded sentence which represents the presupposition. The so-called non-nominal pseudo-cleft sentence is analyzed as a shi-marked simplex sentence with nonfocal materials fronted before shi; therefore it is not a pseudo-cleft at all. This unified analysis of the focus-marking function of shi provides an insight into Chinese grammar and also has potential applications in machine translation and other areas of computational linguistics.