Lecture | CHiLL series
Mandarin shì and Vietnamese là: A Tale of Two Complementizers
- Date
- Wednesday 18 February 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Chinese Linguistics in Leiden (ChiLL)
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.24
Abstract
(Research in collaboration with Wei-wen Roger Liao.)
Recent work has observed that Mandarin shì and Vietnamese là—both historically derived from copulas—may occur immediately after certain mood/modal elements in the absence of a selecting predicate (Yang 2024 and references therein; Phan 2024). Crucially, the licensing elements must be either speaker-oriented adverbs or non-root modal auxiliaries. The former include epistemic, evidential, evaluative, and stance adverbs, while the latter include epistemic and ought-to-be deontic modals. Comparable licensing patterns have been reported for Romanian că (Hill 2007, 2010), French que (Grevisse & Goosse 2008), Spanish que and Italian che (Cruschina & Remberger 2017, 2018), and English that (Radford 2013), among others. We propose that, in these contexts, shì and là function as main-clause complementizers.
In embedded clauses, shì and là may likewise occur immediately following certain predicates. Yang (2024) shows that shì is licensed by a restricted class of predicates, including speech-act verb shuō ‘say’ and psych verb xiǎng ‘think’. By contrast, là is only excluded after Li’s (1990) persuade-type predicates, but is compatible with believe-type predicates more generally. Notably, persuade-type predicates select infinitival clauses whereas believe-type predicates select finite clauses in both Mandarin (Liao & Wang 2022) and Vietnamese (Phan 2025). This distribution suggests that là is restricted to finite environments, leading us to analyze it as a complementizer specified for a [+finite] feature.
A parallel finiteness-based characterization cannot be extended to shì, whose distribution does not only track the finiteness distinction, but also assertivity and/or factivity. Shì is most natural with finite-taking non-factive predicates, such as xiāngxìn ‘believe’, rènwéi ‘think’, or cāi ‘guess’, marginally acceptable with semi-factives, such as zhīdào ‘know’, but degraded after true factives such as yíhàn ‘regret’ (although they too take finite complement clauses). Since non-factives and semi-factives are assertive whereas true factives are non-assertive (Hooper 1975), we suggest that the distribution of shì is conditioned by the assertiveness of the matrix predicate. We further hypothesize that this sensitivity follows from vestiges of shì’s role as a focus(-domain) marker, especially under broad information focus, which expresses “propositional assertion” (Paul & Whitman 2008).
Taken together, we propose that shì is an emerging complementizer undergoing grammaticalization from a focus-marking function, while là underwent a comparable development but is synchronically a full-fledged complementizer. Structurally, both elements occupy low Cs, although only là truly heads the Finiteness Phrase in Rizzi’s (1997) Split-CP system. We then discuss how speaker attitudes of acceptance (Stalnaker 1984) and certainty toward a proposition play a crucial role in licensing these complementizers in both main-clause and embedded environments.
Biography
Trần Phan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at National Tsing Hua University and teaches undergraduate courses part-time at National Chung Hsing University. His research investigates Vietnamese syntax and its interfaces with semantics and pragmatics, in close comparison with Chinese and other Southeast Asian languages. He also works extensively on diachronic syntax, drawing on evidence from historical texts. He is currently on a short-term research visit at the University of Stuttgart.