Summary

Chinese clefts mainly involve two patterns, the shi…de pattern and the bare shi pattern, and the shi…de pattern can be further categorized into the V–O–de pattern and the V–O–de pattern, which are distinguished according to the relative order of the object and de. Compared to clefts in other languages, Chinese clefts are particularly special in two aspects. First, in the surface order, the cleft focus stays together with the cleft presupposition between shi and de, instead of moving to a higher position as in languages like English. Second, Chinese shi…de clefts have a heavy preference for past-tense interpretations and the V–de–O pattern cannot host tense, aspect and modal elements in its presupposition.

In the existing literature, some analyses take shi to be the central element of focus-marking, which partitions cleft sentences into the cleft focus and the cleft presupposition; while other analyses relate shi in clefts with shi in idenitificational/specificational sentences and pin down shi as a copula verb. For de, a group of studies treat it to be an optional element that serves a secondary function such as mood-marking or tense-marking; while other analyses, taking the shi…de pattern to be prototypical clefts that encode contrastiveness or exhaustivity, tend to assign de the function of focus partition and treat shi as a semantically vacuous copula verb. The TAM restriction is then explained by assigning de the syntactic position of a tense/aspect head or by ascribing such restrictions to PF-level linearization constraints and the implied default temporal interpretation of the cleft construction.

Semantically, just like English it-clefts, the existence/absence of the exhaustive effect in Chinese clefts is a much-debated issue that has generated competing views. Some studies distinguish between emphatic and exhaustive meanings, and treat exhaustivity as the defining criterion for cleft sentences in Chinese, while others hold that Chinese clefts only encode contrastiveness and do not mark exhaustivity at the level of assertion.