Acta Linguistica Hungarica Vol. 60 (2013) 4, 409–456 DOI: 10.1556/ALing.60.2013.4.2 On the formation of Mandarin V de O focus clefts Hai-Ping Long Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong lhpszpt@126.com Abstract: In this paper we argue that Mandarin VdeO focus clefts (e.g., T¯ a shì zuò hu ˘ och ¯ e qù de Běij¯ ıng ‘It was by train that he went to Beijing’ and Shì t ¯ a zuò hu˘ och ¯ e qù de Běij¯ ıng ‘It was he who went to Beijing by train’) originate from bi-clausal copulative constructions in Early Modern Chinese with the interaction between particular word order (SVO order, but the relative clause before the head noun) and the adjacency effect commonly observed in the focus clefts of SVO languages. The adjacency effect is locally constrained by the presupposition effect of the particular relative clause to produce a special head-noun focus cleft in Mandarin (T¯ a shì qù de Běij¯ ıng ‘It was Beijing that he went to’). The past time meaning, the negation restriction, and the TAM (tense, aspect, and modality) restrictions that Mandarin VdeO focus clefts exhibit all come from the syntactic requirement that O in a Mandarin VdeO focus cleft should be specific in reference. Keywords: VdeO focus clefts; word order; adjacency effect; presupposition effect 1. Introduction The forms, the functions and the syntactic behaviour of Mandarin V deO focus clefts have been discussed controversially both in the generative (cf. e.g., Huang 1990; Simpson & Wu 2002; Paul & Whitman 2008; Hole 2011, and others) and in the functionalist literature (cf. e.g., Li et al. 1998; Li 2008; Shen 2008, and others). This paper argues from a functional per- spective that Mandarin V deO focus clefts originate from copulative con- structions with the post-copula NP 1 being modified by a relative clause. In this section we give a brief introduction of Mandarin focus clefts (1.1), and 1 In this paper, the following abbreviations are used: AD = adjunct, ADJV = ad- jectivizer, CAUS = causative marker, CLASS = classifier, COP = copula, DEM = demonstrative, EXP= experiential aspect marker, FP = focus phrase, NEG= nega- tion marker, NP = noun phrase, NP1 = the first of two noun phrases, NP2 = the second of two noun phrases, O = object, PERF = perfective aspect marker, RC = relative clause, S = subject, V = verb. 1216–8076/$ 20.00 © 2013 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest