Chinese Object Focus VdeO Cleft Sentences: A Corpus-Based Investigation

This paper offers the first corpus-based study of the underexplored Chinese object-focus VdeO clefts (OFCs), which encode narrow focus on the object within a realized event. Using two large-scale corpora, we investigated their distribution with the 20 most frequent Chinese dynamic verbs, examining subject and object referents as well as focus patterns. Analyses show asymmetries in animacy, concreteness and referentiality, challenging earlier claims about object definiteness. OFCs predominantly convey non-contrastive focus, highlighting objects or supporting anaphoric recovery, while contrastive readings are infrequent and mostly implicit.