A pseudo-gapping approach to the illogical shi'be'construction in Chinese
In Mandarin Chinese,no consensus has been reached on the analysis of the so-called semantically illogical shi'be'sentences(SISSs),such as Ta shi ge Riben niiren(literally'He is a Japanese woman').This paper argues that a pseudo-gapping approach can better account for all the three properties exhibited in SISSs,namely,contrastive reading,verbal interpretation,and negative accommodation in affirmatives.As the pseu-do-gapping construction is a hybrid of VP-ellipsis and the gapping construction,all the properties of SISSs are actually inherited from the two original constructions.This account is not only superior to previous analyses in explanatory power but also facilitates a compar-ison between Chinese and English in terms of pseudo-gapping constructions,thereby shed-ding some light on the study of syntactic diversity cross-linguistically.
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