Toward a Unitary Account of Diverse Shi Constructions in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

現代漢語中的語素“是”有四種主要用法：系詞、肯定焦點標記及論元或附加語焦點輔助成分。除此之外，它還可以用於省略句中。前賢已對“是”的這些用法做過較好的觀察。以往試圖對這些用法做出統一刻畫的努力不在少數。本文重新審視“是”的這些用法，并論證近期對于“是”所提出的一些統一理論闡釋存在問題，并嘗試在動態句法理論框架內從句子解析的角度對這些用法做出新的統一闡釋。在動態句法中，句子是從左到右逐詞加工構建命題的單調過程。本文提出，在語義構建過程中，“是”始終貢獻一個等同關係謂詞，該謂詞與其他某種邏輯類型的表達式組合。“是” 在句子中的出現是否會導致某種語用效果的產生取決于“是”以及“是”之後出現的成分。

The morpheme shi (the fourth tone) in Mandarin has four major uses: as a copula verb, a verum focus marker and an associate of argument/adjunct focus, and it is also involved in elliptical sentences. These uses have been well-observed in the literature, and many previous attempts have been made to provide a unitary theoretical characterization of these uses. In this paper, a revisit is paid to these uses of shi and it is argued that some of the latest unitary theoretical accounts of this morpheme are problematic. A novel unitary theoretical account of these uses is formulated from a parsing perspective in the framework of Dynamic Syntax, wherein sentences are viewed as left-to-right word-by-word monotonic processes of constructing propositions. It is proposed that shi always contributes a predicate of identity relation which combines with a corresponding formula of some logical type. Whether the presence of shi in a sentence gives rise to pragmatic effects or not depends on shi and the syntactic properties of the expression following shi.