On the formation of MandarinVdeO focus clefts

Abstract

In this paper we argue that Mandarin VdeO focus clefts (e.g., Tā shi zuo huŏchē qu de Běijīng ‘It was by train that he went to Beijing’ and Shi tā zuo huŏchē qu de Běijīng ‘It was he who went to Beijing by train’) originate from bi-clausal copulative constructions in Early Modern Chinese with the interaction between particular word order (SVO order, but the relative clause before the head noun) and the adjacency effect commonly observed in the focus clefts of SVO languages. The adjacency effect is locally constrained by the presupposition effect of the particular relative clause to produce a special head-noun focus cleft in Mandarin (Tā shi qu de Běijīng ‘It was Beijing that he went to’). The past time meaning, the negation restriction, and the TAM (tense, aspect, and modality) restrictions that Mandarin VdeO focus clefts exhibit all come from the syntactic requirement that O in a Mandarin VdeO focus cleft should be specific in reference.