| Emphatic constructions are the one of main ways to express emphasis in language.Previous studies have seen an insufficient understanding of the status of emphatic constructions in emphasis systems and the relation between emphatic constructions and other emphatic phenomena,and it appears that there isn't an uncontroversial definition of emphatic constructions.Meanwhile,many contrastive studies are devoted to the syntactic analysis of emphatic constructions but tend to focus less on their semantic and pragmatic features.Given those drawbacks,the present study puts forward a semantic model of emphasis under the guidance of Systemic Functional Linguistics,drawing on which the study clarifies the status of emphatic constructions in this model and their characteristics On the basis of these concepts,this study analyzes and contrasts emphatic constructions in English and Chinese syntactically,semantically and textually with the aim of exposing similarities and differences between English and Chinese emphatic constructions and explaining associated reasons.Based on the theory of metafunctions,this study points out that emphasis is a semantic concept,relying on the three metafunctions,namely the ideational metafunction,the interpersonal metafunction and the textual metafunction,in the meantime,it enhances the three functions,such as the semantic intensity of ideational categories,the value of modality,the intensity of information in the flow of discourse,etc.In other words,emphasis is subject to metafunctions and plays an auxiliary function.From the perspective of the rank scale,emphasis can be realized at each level of language,including the phonological/graphological,lexicogrammatical and textual levels,and further each rank can also be stratified,for instance,the lexicogrammatical rank scale of representing emphasis contains phrases and clauses.All in all,this study constructs a semantic model of emphasis in accordance with the ideas of metafunctions and rank scales.In terms of emphatic constructions,being one type of realizations of emphatic function,they are the phenomenon at the level of clause and have the following four characteristics distinguished from other emphatic realizations:(a)emphatic constructions lie on or tend to the grammar pole of lexicogrammatical continuum of realizing emphasis at the clausal level.(b)emphatic constructions have typical syntactic structures.(c)their emphatic markers lack experiential meaning and carry no contrastive stress.(d)emphatic constructions aren't at the mercy of rules of discourse distribution because they express emphasis all on their own.In the light of these features,the emphatic construction is defined as a clause pattern that highlights one or some clausal elements resulting in increasing its or their information intensity and enhancing its or their corresponding experiential or interpersonal meaning which is the focus of potential listeners'/readers' attention.Thus according to the semantic categories of highlighted elements,emphatic constructions are classified into emphatic constructions of experiential salience and of interpersonal salience,and then the former includes types of participant-role salience,circumstantial salience and situational salience,and the latter includes types of judging salience and evaluative salience.Following the functional descriptive idea of "meaning is the core,which is realized by forms",it is discovered that the similarities and differences of English and Chinese emphatic constructions are as follows.As for emphatic constructions of experiential salience,English and Chinese can both highlight the following semantic categories,including participant roles in action process,mental process,relational process,behavioral process,communicative process and existential process,situations constructed by the former six processes,and eight circumstantial categories consisting of extent,location,manner,cause,contigency,accompaniment,role and angle.What's more,there are two relations between emphatic constructions and congruent forms,one is that they have same experiential meaning,the other is that emphatic constructions are the ideational metaphorical variants of congruent forms,which may lead to inconsistent experiential meaning.Besides similarities,English and Chinese mostly differ in the syntactic functions and grammatical attributes of their key emphatic markers.In English,the emphatic marker "be" has two syntactic functions from two distinct structures,firstly "be" is the Operator acting as the Mood element with"it" in "it be x that/wh-words..."("x"refers to the highlighted element),secondly"be" is the Main Verb in "wh-words...be x"(including its variant structures"all/the-nominal group+be+x").In Chinese,the emphatic marker "shi" and the secondary marker "de" compose four structures,including "shi1...x...de","…de shi2 x","shi2 x de" and "shi3 x de".Specifically,"shi1”acts as the Operator,"shi2" acts as the Predicator,and"shi3" acts as the Inferential Adjunct.As regards grammatical attributes,"be" is finite that is fixed in position in clauses,followed by the highlighted element,whereas "shi" is non-finite and flexible in clauses,which might not be adjacent to the highlighted element.Likewise,emphatic constructions of interpersonal salience in English and Chinese can also highlight same semantic categories,including six types of judgement which are probability,usuality,truth,obviousness,obligation and volition,and seven types of evaluation which are emotive reaction,cognitive reaction,behavioral norm,human attribute,potentiality,value of entity and circumstance.However,the emphatic mechanisms in English and Chinese are unlike,which also lead to distinctions in realizations.In English,on the one hand,the highlighted element expressing judgement/evaluation is represented as an independent proposition and the judged/evaluated item is represented as another one.On the other hand,the highlighted element is introduced by the thematic build-up "it be",being the thematic focus of a clause.Therefore,the syntactic structure of English emphatic constructions is construed as "it[Subject]+be[Main Verb]+x[Complement]+the judged/evaluated item[Complement]”.In Chinese,there are three mechanisms:(a)adding a set of correlative Mood Particles-"shi"and"de" so as to enhance affirmative mood.In this case,"shi" precedes the Predicator and "de" is at the end of a clause,which doesn't change the basic structure of the clause.(b)employing the nominal group triggered by "de" to experientialize interpersonal elements and enhance the validity of propositions or proposals.In this case,the syntactic structure is "the judged/evaluated item[Subject]+shi[Predicator]+x-de[Complement]".(c)through the irregular judgement meaning implying by the structure of "lian x ye/dou y",which enhances the truth value of discourse.In this structure,"lian" is the predicator of the prepositional phrase which introduces the part of the highlighted element "x".From the textual point of view,this study investigates the distribution of English and Chinese emphatic constructions in novels,news and scripts.It is found that the overall distribution is same in English and Chinese,that is,scripts>novels>news.Taking the styles of language into consideration,it is shown that emphatic constructions of interpersonal salience are used more frequently than emphatic constructions of experiential salience in written texts in English,which reverses in spoken texts.In Chinese,emphatic constructions of experiential salience are the most common type whether in written texts or in spoken texts.Locally,there are three distributive features between English and Chinese emphatic constructions.Firstly,emphatic constructions of participant-role salience are the most common experiential salience type in any texts both in English and Chinese.Secondly,English and Chinese differs in hierarchical sequences of usage frequency of various emphatic constructions in each type of texts.Thirdly,the total usage frequency of emphatic constructions are different in English and Chinese texts of each genre.To be specific,English emphatic constructions are less common than Chinese in novels and scripts,but the opposite happens in news.In general,these distributive features are mainly influenced by the following two aspects,one is the textual features,the other is the objective or subjective feature implied by emphatic constructions.With respect to the first aspect,it shapes the overall distribution.In terms of novels and scripts,they both describe complete stories involving multiple events and perspectives,which creates favorable conditions for the emergence of various emphatic constructions.However,news reports are characterized by the principle of "spreading maximum information in minimum length",hence they tend to apply emphatic vocabularies rather than emphatic constructions.As a result,emphatic constructions in news are less common than those in fictions and scripts.With respect to the second aspect,it causes unbalanced distribution between English and Chinese emphatic constructions in texts,especially in news.English emphatic constructions seem to be objective which conforms to the stylistic feature of news,so they are common in news,by contrast,Chinese emphatic constructions are more subjective,so they are used more often in texts in which objectivity and neutrality are not required rather than in news.In addition,from the perspective of discourse production and development,this study summarizes five main discourse functions of English and Chinese emphatic constructions of experiential salience,namely correcting discourse,initiating topics,continuing topics,changing topics and summarizing discourse,and four discourse functions of English and Chinese emphatic constructions of interpersonal salience,namely dominating viewpoints,promoting viewpoints,contrasting viewpoints and summarizing viewpoints.Ultimately,this study elucidates the diachronic,cognitive and thinking factors that cause the similarities and differences between English and Chinese emphatic constructions.From the diachronic perspective,it turns out that the differences of grammatical properties between "be" and "shi" derive from dissimilar origins of the two emphatic markers."be" evolves as follows:verb?copula?emphatic marker,and "shi" evolves as follows:deictic pronoun?copula?emphatic marker.In contrast,"be" has inflectional and finite features due to its verb source,while "shi" develops from noun without such features.From the cognitive perspective,it firstly reveals that English and Chinese people both perceive emphatic constructions on the basis of the stage model.Differently,English people have a propensity to place the highlighted element in a fixed position of the figure so as to shift the viewer's visual focus from figure to ground,whereas Chinese people have a tendency to use emphatic markers to activate the highlighted element in an unfixed position,whereby the viewer perceives emphatic constructions in the order of event development.In the view of philosophy,different thinking modes are the underlying reason.In English,emphatic constructions possess objectivity,dichotomy between the highlighted part and the non-highlighted part,and abstractness under the influence of objective,analytic and abstract thought,while in Chinese,emphatic constructions show subjectivity,integrity of the highlighted part and the non-highlighted part and concreteness under the influence of subjective,holistic and imagic thought.In summary,the present study is supported by Major Program of National Social Science Fund of China:Database Construction of Language Resources of Those Countries along the Belt and Road and Contrastive Studies between Chinese and Foreign Languages(19ZDA319),which constructs a semantic model of emphasis and expounds the definition and classification of emphatic constructions based on the idea of metafunctions.Thus,this study will enrich theoretical research on emphatic constructions in terms of semantics.Additionally,through the contrastive analysis and explanation of emphatic constructions in English and Chinese,this study reveals relevant features in English and Chinese,which will promote the development of Systemic Functional Linguistics in the field of contrastive studies to some extent and provide some reference for discourse analysis. |
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