Lecture | CHiLL series
Confirmative (shì)…de in Mandarin: Propositional Focus and A′-Dependency
- Date
- Tuesday 8 September 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Chinese Linguistics in Leiden (ChiLL)
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.30
Abstract
This paper examines the semantic and syntactic properties of a subtype of Mandarin (shì)…de sentences, which we term the confirmative (shì)…de construction, as illustrated in (1) and (2) (Chao 1968: 296), and argues that it instantiates a high-focus structure. Such sentences typically express what has been described as “speaker’s confirmation”, with (shì)…de contributing an additional propositional interpretation roughly paraphrasable as ‘it is the case that …’ (Chao 1968; Yuan 2003; Cheng 2008; Paul & Whitman 2008; Liu & Cheng 2021, a.o.).
(1) Zhāng Sān (shì) qù-guo Běijīng de.
Zhang San SHI go-EXP Beijing DE
‘It is the case that Zhang San has been to Beijing.’
(2) Tā (shì) gēn nǐ kāi wánxiào de.
3SG SHI with 2SG make joke DE
‘He was just joking with you—that was what he was doing.’
We show that confirmative (shì)…de is semantically and syntactically distinct from cleft/constituent-focus (shì)…de, other broad (shì)…de constructions, bare-de sentences, and copular clauses. Formally, de is obligatory, whereas shì is optional and normally unstressed. The construction is compatible with statives, aspectually anchored eventives, and modalized predicates, but generally excludes bare eventives. More importantly, it is contextually restricted: it cannot normally initiate discourse or answer an all-new question, but requires contextually salient propositional alternatives, typically supplied by a prior assumption or bias. We argue that this restriction follows from its propositional-focus semantics: confirmative (shì)…de asserts its prejacent p while triggering a maximality presupposition that presents p as maximal among the contextually relevant alternatives, thereby deriving its characteristic confirmative interpretation.
More importantly, confirmative (shì)…de exhibits root sensitivity characteristic of A′-dependencies (cf. Haegeman 2012, Miyagawa 2022): it is licensed under relatively root-like embedding predicates such as say, believe, and realize, but degraded under predicates such as deny and regret; similarly, it is possible in peripheral adverbial clauses but excluded from central adverbials. It also resists interrogative dependencies targeting the same propositional alternatives whereas alternative questions remain possible with constituent-focus (shì)…de.
We argue that these distributional and intervention effects provide evidence that the focused clausal domain enters into an A′-dependency with the high left periphery. Building on Mursell (2021), we propose that confirmative (shì)…de projects a high FocP in the extended CP domain: the focused clausal constituent moves to Spec,FocP, de realizes Foc°, and optional shì marks the left edge of the focused constituent. The surface subject preceding shì, by contrast, is analyzed as a base-generated aboutness topic, co-indexed with an empty pronominal subject within the focused clause rather than extracted from it. The resulting analysis provides a unified account of the construction’s propositional focus, root-sensitive distribution, and the asymmetric syntactic status of shì and de.
Biographies
Hang Cheng is an Associate Professor at the Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, P.R. China. She received her PhD in Linguistics from Leiden University in 2021. Her research focuses on theoretical linguistics and Mandarin Chinese syntax, with particular interests in word structure, argument structure, tense–aspect–modality (TAM), and the syntax–pragmatics interface. Zhaole Yang is a university lecturer at Leiden University.