Development of "是" Copula Verb and Copula Construction in Chinese

Abstract

This paper aims to clarify the historical development of the Chinese copula 是. The copula 是 diachronically changed its status from a demonstrative pronoun to a demonstrative pronoun manifesting characteristics of a copula verb before it functions as a copula during the Eastern Han period. Copula sentences are in Chinese categorized into four types: equative, predicational, specificational and identificational. In Archaic Chinese, copula constructions in a narative discourse analyzed as zero copula constructions in which the copula subject and the copula complement are juxtaposed. After the Tang Dynasty, copula constructions substantially incread, whereas zero copula constructions was still used in Classical Chinese narratives. The study in conclusion, Chinese zro copula constructions and verbal copula constructions develop in parallel. Since the May Fourth Movement, 1919 the latter has eventually substituted the former. Thus, there is only one type of the copula constructions in Modern Chinese narratives. This finding affirms that each language has on type of the copula constructions as claimed by Curnow (2000).