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Cleft construction is a type of commonly-used focus construction both in Englishand Chinese. Jespersen (1949) is the first one who puts forward the notion of Englishit-cleft. He thinks that with it is and that being inserted, it-cleft can single out oneparticular element of a sentence and direct people’s attention to it so as to mark contrast.Quirk (1972) assumes that it-cleft can divide a single clause into two separate sections,each with its own verb. Therefore, structure of English it-cleft can be summarized as:

(1) a. pronoun + copula + clefted XP + cleft clause (Reeve, 2013)b. It was Mary who hit John.c. It was John that Mary saw.d. It was yesterday that Mary hit John.

In Chinese, shi…de sentence has been argued to be the cleft construction similarto it-cleft in English. However, compared with English it-cleft, it is relatively hard toset a quite explicit delimitation of Chinese shi…de cleft. As can be seen in the literature,there still exists debate among scholars on this topic since bare shi sentence and barede sentence sometimes can hold the same function or express the same prominentinformation in some specific contexts, which is difficult to distinguish from shi…decleft. For example, Lee (2005) and Paul & Whitman (2008) assume that the bare shisentence has the same discourse function as the shi…de cleft. While for Hole (2011),he contends that it is the bare de sentence that should be analyzed as instance of shi…decleft with the copula dropped. However, the shi…de cleft is in fact different with bareshi and bare de sentence in some perspectives. Most scholars now tend to think ofshi…de sentence as the standard formula of Chinese cleft construction (Bai Lan, 2017).For example, Fang Mei (1995) points out that the shi…de sentence has the similarfunction with it is…that… for marking the contrastive focus. C

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1.2 Significance of the Research

Making a further study on such three questions has great significance. Thetheoretical significances lie in: first, as a new and effective theory, Phase can simplifythe derivational process and explain related problems of English it-cleft and Chineseshi…de cleft. It can also offer new idea and perspective to other types of sentences.Second, analyzing and comparing differences and similarities of the syntacticmechanism between it-cleft and shi…de cleft from the cross-linguistic view can putmore language facts in research and thus expand the overall research of English andChinese and delve into more commonalities and individualities of different languages.While practical significances lie in: first, researching on the derivational mechanismbetween English it-cleft and Chinese shi…de cleft can deepen people’s understandingto these two constructions and thus help them to learn clefts better. Second, thecomparative study between English it-cleft and Chinese shi…de cleft is also instructiveto classroom teaching. Therefore, teachers can explain clefts in English and Chinesefrom more aspects.

In a word, this thesis will make the following contributions and本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。