Shi … de focus clefts in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

The shi … de construction in Mandarin Chinese is a cover term for at least four distinct constructions. We focus on the remarkable internal properties of the shi … de pattern proper, where both shi and de are present. We concur with a long tradition of scholarship identifying shi … de as a cleft construction, but we show it to have very different properties from it – or pseudo-clefts in languages like English. The crucial distinguishing property of shi … de clefts is that they involve no A′ movement. This is linked to the fact that the presupposition in the shi … de focus cleft involves a projection smaller than CP. It thus lacks a landing site for A′ movement and fails to host material such as negation, normally compatible with full CP clefts in languages such as English. The Mandarin pattern shows that the basic semantic property of clefts, bipartioning into focus and presupposition, is logically independent from A′ movement.