Form And Meaning Of Specificational Constructions And Their Motivations

As a common syntactic category among human languages, identificational constructions which are usually triggered by a copula express a kind of assertion or identification. Using English and Chinese as the data, the present study focuses on an important type in identifcational constructions, namely, specificational constructions. The specificational constructions both in English and Chinese can be formulated as XP be/shi YP, the semantic function of which is exhaustively specifying a value (YP) to the variable related to XP. According to their complexity, the present study roughly classifies specificational constructions into two types:simple and complex. The first type can be described as NP1be/shi NP2in which both NP1and NP2are noun phrases; the second chiefly refers to clefts and pseudoclefts. It should be noted that although this research focuses on English specificational constructions, it also touches upon Chinese specificational constructions which are taken as a line of cross-language evidence in support of the theoretical hypotheses proposed in the present work. The present study is mainly concerned with three questions as follows:What syntactic and semantic characteristics do specificational constructions have? How are the forms and meanings of specificational constructions motivated? What are the unities and diversities between English and Chinese specificational constructions? The major findings are as follows.First, simple and complex specificational constructions both have the function of identification or assertion, thus both falling into the category of identificational constructions or assertive constructions. Specificational constructions are syntactically and semantically characterized by the three typical features as follows:(1) The precopular and postcopular part of the copula can be interpreted as a variable-value relation. The precopular variable is usually or simlilar to a definite description, so specificational constructions have referential uniqueness, and the value for the variable has the entailment of "uniqueness" in the act of specification according to the Quantity Maxim under the Cooperative Principle proposed by Grice.(2) Specificational constructions have "obligatorily existence presupposition". Now that the precopular part of specificational constructions shares the characteristics of definite descriptions, it also has the "existence presupposition" like definite descriptions. That is to say, an event has taken place, and the act of specification just identifies a certain aspect of the event.(3) The construction meaning of specificational constructions is "exhaustively identifying", which is not the semantic sum of its components but the semantic integration of NP1,NP2and copula be.Second, as far as the syntactic forms are concerned, simple specificational constructions are probably the inheritance of the construction schema of identifcational constructions (also called assertive constructions). This process may involve "instance-based analogical inheritance". It means that the form of specificational constructions is based on the analogy of equative and predicative constructions. The syntactic forms of clefts and pseudoclefts both in English and in Chinese mainly derive from the vertical inheritance of NP be NP, the superordinate schema or the core schema of specificational constructions. Meanwhile they also inherit syntactic and semantic characteristics from nominalization constructions, subject-predicate constructions, copula be constructions, and several lexical constructions. Exhaustive identifying, the construction meaning of specificational constructions derives from the combination of the identifying function of copula be and the unique referring function of the variable in specificational constructions since the variable of this type of constructions is usually, or similar to, a definite description. Clefts and pseudoclefts, both in English and in Chinese inherit the exhaustive identifying of specificational constructions via the vertical inheritance of the construction schema, on one hand, and entail semantic exclusiveness, on the other hand, because they themselves typically bear contrastive focus. It follows that the construction meaning of specificational clefts and pseudoclefts can be further generalized as exclusive identification.Third, the simple and complex specificational constructions in English and Chinese have similar functions. There are very few studies on simple specificational constructions among the scholars majoring in Chinese, and their classification of the assertive construction NP be NP are still dominated by the equative-attributive dichotomy of Wang Li (1957). It is found in this study that the specificational-predicational-equative trichotomy of simple specificational constructions in English also applies to simple specificational constructions in Chinese. Chinese clefts and pseudoclefts with the Chinese shi and de share with English clefts and pseudoclefts the typical syntactic and semantic features including obligatorily existence presupposition, exclusive entailment and variable-value relation, etc. In general, compared with English specificational constructions, Chinese specificational constructions have more forms and accordingly richer meanings. Another finding deserving to be noted is that clefts and pseudoclefts in English and in Chinese are not in one to one correspondence. There are cases when a Chinese pseudocleft has to be used to translate an English cleft. This shows that there is not that obvious difference between clefts and pseudoclefts in Chinese.It is proposed that the act of specification represented by the specificational constructions is a common semantic act. The present study systematically analyzes the syntactic and semantic features of English and Chinese specificational constructions, and elaborates on the motivations of forms and meanings of specificational constructions via schematic inheritance and semantic integration principle advocated within the framework of construction grammar. The present research sheds some light on the origin of form and meaning of specificational constructions, improves in some measure the schema hierarchy theory of constructions, and enlarges the approaches to construction grammar studies.