A functional approach to two 'focussing' constructions in English and Chinese  

Oleh:

Huang, Guowen ; Fawcett, Robin P.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 18 no. 1-2 (1996), page 179-194.
Topik: Chinese; English; enhanced theme; functional; incongruent; /t-cleft; object-as-role-in-event; Participant Role; WH-cleft.
Fulltext: 18_01-02_Huang.pdf (983.58KB)

Isi artikel

This paper analyses the enhanced theme construction and the object-as-role-in-event construction (respectively known as '/t-cleft' and 'WH-cleft' in formal grammars) in English and their equivalent constructions in Chinese, using the Cardiff model of Systemic Functional Grammar. The analysis proposed here is significantly different from other approaches in many ways. One of the important point is that we assign Participant Roles such as Attribute, Carrier to the participants in the process existing in the construction. In this way our approach is inherently functional and semantically-motivated. We regard the copula verb be (in English) or shi (in Chinese) as the Main Verb of the relational process which fills the sentence. Our analysis shows that a functionally-oriented and semantically-motivated approach to the focussing constructions is more insightful in understanding the discourse fur,,-t;~- ~ these constructions than structure-based studies.

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