Constraint and content: a procedural account of the <i>shi</i> … <i>de</i> _pre-object construction in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract This article re-examines the syntactic properties of the so-called shi … de cleft construction in Mandarin Chinese, with special attention paid to the morpheme de that appears between the verb and the object (hence-forth de pre-object ). It reveals how the shi and d e pre-object morphemes at issue independently interact with focus and proposes a formal model of how the functional morphemes impose procedural constraints on and make semantic contributions to the construction of logical forms of propositions in a process of parsing a string of words linearly delivered in some context of communication. The account is implemented in the framework of Dynamic Syntax, which provides theoretical and technical convenience for capturing interaction between syntactic idiosyncrasy of lexical items and general deductive rules in a parsing process. The current account has a wider empirical coverage than the most comphrehensive one in literature and has theoretical implications regarding syntactic and semantic information of functional morphemes and pragmatic effect.