Chinese cleft structures and the dynamics of processing

This paper addresses the challenge of Chinese cleft structures, involving a pairing of the particles shi and de, which in different combinations display a variety of focus-related effects and different potentials for ambiguity: clefts and pseudo-clefts in particular differ only in order of the elements. We argue that retaining conventional assumptions necessarily involves positing unrelated structures and multiple ambiguities, leaving the systematicity of variation unexplained; and we go on to argue that it is only by turning to a dynamic framework in which syntax is defined as mechanisms for incremental build-up of interpretation that an integrated characterisation of these effects is made possible. Adopting the Dynamic Syntax framework (Cann etal 2005), we argue that shi and de induce procedures for incremental build-up of construal which feed and can be fed by other such procedures; and we show how the array of effects both in clefts and pseudo-clefts can be shown to follow from the dynamics of building up interpretation reflecting online processing.