Cleft construction and exhaustivity
semantics, pragmatics
We used three experiments showing that Mandarin shi…(de) clefts encode exhaustivity as part of its presupposition, which is different from zhiyou “only” and answers to constituent questions. We also show that 6-year-olds have problem interpreting this exhaustive meaning in clefts, but not the other exhaustivity-inferring constructions (collaborative work with Liu Ying).
Output: NASSLLI/ESSLLI2016,Glow-in-Asia2017, NELS47