"Exhaustivity Contrastivity And The Semantics Of Mandarin Cleft-Related Structures | Language & Colloquials

Exhaustivity Contrastivity and the Semantics of Mandarin Cleft-related Structures investigates the semantics of the cleft and cleft-related structures in Mandarin which over several decades have presented analytical challenges for semantic theory. The goal of this book in broad terms is three-fold: (i) to figure out what clefting adds to the semantics of a sentence; (ii) to set apart the meaning and the discourse function of each type of cleft-related structure; and (iii) to provide a uniform analysis of Mandarin clefts and their related structures. More specifically it addresses the following questions: (i) what is the semantics of Mandarin clefts? (ii) what do exhaustivity and contrastivity contribute to the meaning of clefts? (iii) what are the semantic (or pragmatic) factors that determine the variation of clefts related structures and canonical sentences? and (iv) cross-linguistically speaking how do Mandarin shi...de cleft and its related structures differ from similar constructions such as English it-cleft French c’est cleft and German es-cleft? This book will be informative for linguists who are working on cleft constructions and focus on sensitive structures cross-linguistically and those interested in experimental semantics and pragmatics. |Exhaustivity Contrastivity and the Semantics of Mandarin Cleft-related Structures | Language & Colloquials