Chinese object-focus shì…de cleft sentences: A preliminary corpus-driven analysis of discourse-pragmatic functions

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of the discourse functions of Chinese object-focus VdeO clefts (OFC), which encode narrow focus on the object of a presupposed event. Based on two large corpora, the study examines their distribution with respect to information structure and discourse use in naturally occurring data, in combination with the 20 most frequent Chinese dynamic verbs. Adopting a corpus-driven approach, the analysis first provides a classification at the level of information structure, distinguishing OFCs that convey contrastive focus from those that convey non-contrastive focus. At a second level, it investigates the functional range of OFCs across contexts of use. The results show that non-contrastive OFCs are clearly dominant, with frequent occurrences in assertive and anaphoric uses. Contrastive OFCs are comparatively rare and often implicit. Within this group, oppositional uses are the most frequent, where two elements are in opposition to highlight differences without implying correction.