Affiliation:
1. Nanyang Technology University
2. The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Abstract
Abstract
This paper addresses the development of the Chinese V de O cleft construction, and how the cleft
constructional network was developed in the history of Chinese. It is argued that V de O clefts emerged in the
13th century which was about 300 years later than VP de clefts. A key factor in their development is the use in
Middle Chinese of relative clause in post-copula position. We argue that the emergence of V de O clefts also
involved analogization to the extant VP de clefts as well as deferred equatives. Once V de O
clefts occurred, they were recruited into the cleft network as a subschema, resulting in the schematic network being augmented and
expanded. This study is a contribution to the developing field of constructionalization by making more explicit the way how nodes
are created in a constructional network and how the network is reorganized and expanded.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Communication,Language and Linguistics