The development of the Chinese V de O cleft construction

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.