Zur Frage der chinesischen shi-de-Konstruktion: Eine konzeptualistische und diskurspragmatische Erklärung

Abstract

This paper addresses the Modem Standard Chinese shi-de construction, a controversial phenomenon both in linguistics and in foreign language teaching. By adopting a conceptualist view of grammatical structures and by taking into account the role of discourse pragmatics in grammar, the current study is able to provide a unitary account of different shi-de constructions, which have been thought to be unrelated. More specifically, the author draws attention to the structural schema involving a nominal phrase as the predicative complement which is shared not only by all the subtypes of the shi-de construction, but also by the simple copular construction whose predicative complement is a noun or noun phrase. Taking this structural commonality as the point of departure, the author proposes a conceptual and semantic network in which the simple copular construction is the prototype that motivates the various subtypes of the shi-de construction structurally, semantically and in terms of information structure. Context, too, is taken into account in the interpretation of the subtypes. The revelation of the conceptual basis and cognitive economy inherent in the conceptualist model of a semantic network may hopefully contribute to increased efficiency in the acquisition of the linguistic structure in question.