Article published In:
Studies in Language: Online-First Articles

The development of the Chinese V de O cleft construction

A constructional approach

| Nanyang Technological University National Institute of Education
| The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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.

Keywords: Chinese, the V de O cleft, neoanalysis, analogization, constructionalization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies on the formation of the cleft construction
  • 3.Some basic concepts of the framework
    • 3.1Constructionalization and constructional changes
    • 3.2Multiple sources
  • 4.The rise of the V de O cleft
    • 4.1The copular construction in Early Middle Chinese
    • 4.2[Object-RC NP] in Late Middle Chinese
    • 4.3The emergence of the V de O cleft
      • 4.3.1The emergence of [NP SHI Object-RC NP]
      • 4.3.2The emergence of the V de O cleft
  • 5.A constructional account of the development of the V de O cleft
    • 5.1Modelling the development of the V de O cleft construction
    • 5.2The factors enabling the emergence of the V de O cleft
      • 5.2.1Neoanalysis
      • 5.2.2Analogization
    • 5.3The network of the Chinese cleft construction
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 6 September 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.21071.zha
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