De outside the cleft

Not what you expected

Abstract

The Mandarin Chinese particle de’s usages as a relativizer, nominalizer, and possessor are well understood. However, de’s use as a sentence-final particle (sfp), as in Wo zhao ni shiyou de ‘I’m looking for your roommate de,’ remains underexplored. This paper presents corpus and self-constructed data to highlight the environments in which this sentence-final particle is used. Additionally, we provide a semantic analysis of de’s sfp use, suggesting that its primary semantics indicates that its prejacent proposition holds true, while at least one of the typical indicative circumstances associated with that proposition does not hold true on a non-at-issue level. This meaning, along with its licensing contexts, is distinguished from the use of de in the focus-marking shi...de construction. We further support this claim with structural evidence, including the resistance of bare sfp de to embeddability, its interaction with other sentence-final particles, as well as possible co-occurrence of the two constructions. We believe the current study fills an empirical gap of bare sfp de and offers a more adequate and precise characterization of its meaning contribution.