Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka, 2016.
“Encoding QUD congruence in Mandarin Chinese.”
Presented at European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL) 9 (2015) and Theoretical Linguistics at Keio 2016.
I report on a particle in Mandarin Chinese which grammatically encodes congruence with an accepted Question Under Discussion (QUD). This is the marker shì in its so-called “focus marker” use (Teng, 1979, a.o.). This results in cleft semantics as in Velleman et al. (2012). I unify the behavior of shì in declaratives with the understudied behavior of shì in questions. I discuss the syntax/semantics of QUD congruence and differences between the distribution of shì and ‘only.’