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The development of the Chinese V de O cleft construction: A constructional approach
Citation
Zhan, F., & Pan, H. (2023). The development of the Chinese V de O cleft construction: A constructional approach. Studies in Language, 47(2), 318-349. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.21071.zha
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.
Date Issued
2023
Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal
Studies in Language