Yen-Hui Li

The copula as a discourse-anaphoric pairing predicate: pair-list shì in Mandarin Chinese

This paper argues that the overt shì in Mandarin pair-list answers functions as a discourse-anaphoric pairing predicate rather than a standard copula, or a focus marker. The relevant mapping is not created by overt shì itself, but is established by the Question under Discussion (QUD) structure, introduced explicitly by...