A Cognitive Study Of Shi... De Cleft Construction

The main content of this study is the Chinese “shi...de” cleft sentence.The research of this paper is mainly based on the “Three-Plane” theory and cognitive linguistics related theories,and carries out a cognitive study of the “shi...de” construction.The sentence pattern “shi...de” studied in this paper only studies the emphasized sentence pattern with this form.It does not include,for example,judgment sentences and other sentence patterns.There are many researches on the usage meanings of the “shi” sentence and the “de” in the predecessors,and there are many researches on the sentence of “shi...de”.However,the number of researchers who studied this sentence from the perspective of cognitive and structural grammar is relatively small.In this paper,through the diachronic and synchronic summary of the predecessor’s sentence pattern of “shi...de”,we have an overall grasp of the nature of the word “shi”,“de” and “shi…de” construction.This article mainly aims to answer two questions.First,it analyzes the motivation for the formation of cleft structures.Second,from the perspective of cognition,it is analyzed how the shi…de cleft construction can play an important role in emphasis.This article summarizes the previous studies.The word “shi” originally existed as a demonstrative pronoun.Later,it evolved into a judgment mark,a focus mark,and an emphasis mark.The word “de” has evolved from the original meaning word into a structural particle and a modal particle.Syntactically,the research on the development of “shi” sentence to the “shi...de” emphasis sentence has been done for a long time.And in this section,based on the analysis of the “shi” and the “de” and on the hypotheses of the previous scholars on cleft construction,I put forward my own analysis.The “shi…de” cleft construction is composed of two clauses.This is a question-answer pair.Semantically,this sentence is analyzed in terms of the presupposition,implication and contrast of cognitive semantics.In the “shi...de” sentence,the emphasized part is new information,while the rest of the sentence is old information,and the old information is the presupposition of the sentence.Emphasis sentences not only emphasize new information,but also contain old information.From the aspect of pragmatics,discourse focus and discourse function are discussed.Emphasis is placed on the formation of discourse focus,but this focus is not a natural focus but a comparative focus.In terms of discourse function,the sentence “shi...de” also has the function of topic introducing,topic extending,and topic shifting.The fifth part is the analysis of this construction in cognitive linguistics.The “shi...de” construction serves as an emphasis marker,and it naturally has a reason to emphasize the marker.Through the analysis of “figure-ground” theory,it is found that the component that is emphasized in the “shi...de” construction is “figure” and the other components of the sentence are “ground”.This is in line with people’s cognition and is also consistent with the concept of cognitive linguistics.In the aspect of iconicity,the sentence pattern “shi...de” conforms to Distance Iconicity and Asymmetric Iconicity in cognitive linguistics.The closer the distance accent mark is,the more it can be emphasized.If the distance of emphasized marker is far,it is not in the center of people’s attention.For Asymmetry Iconicity,this sentence breaks the gestalt theory,adding “shi” and “de” to split the sentence into two parts.One part is the emphasis part or “figure”,and the rest is not emphasized part,the “ground”.Through the analysis of the “figure-ground” theory and iconicity in this sentence pattern,the possibility and motivation of this sentence pattern are given from the perspective of cognition.Through the analysis of this article,we can deepen the understanding of the formation motivation of this construction,and also from the cognitive aspect,have a comprehensive analysis of this sentence.It is hoped that this paper can provide a reference for the future research of this cleft construction and related research on these emphasis structures.