A Study on Double Focus Sentence Formed by Focus Marker in Modern Chinese

This paper classify word and syntactic forms indicating the focus into three categories: focus markers, only quantifier, and focus sensitive operators. Among them, the two simultaneous appearance of focus marker ‘Shi’, ‘Lian’, ‘Shi…de’ and only quantifier ‘Zhi, Jiu’ in the sentence was called ‘Focus Marker Double Focus Sentence’ and analyze the properties of each focus. The types of focus emphasized by the focus marker and only quantifier are divided into three types: “Contrastive focus, Topical focus, and Identificational focus” based on [±contrastiveness][±exhaustiveness]. The Contrastive focus has [+contrastiveness] [+exhaustiveness], the Topical focus has [+contrastiveness][-exhaustiveness], the Identificational focus has [-contrastiveness][+exhaustiveness]. According to the analysis through contextual sentences, we can see that focus marker ‘Shi’ and only quantifier ‘Zhi, Jiu’ usually lead to ‘Contrastive focus’, focus marker ‘Lian’ lead to ‘Topical focus’, and focus syntactic form ‘Shi…de’ lead to ‘Identificational focus’.