Syntactic versus Communicative Function: The Case of Two Chinese Morphemes

Assuming that every formal distinction has its correlative function, and that the “valeur” of a linguistic element is determined by its relations with other elements in the structure, the purpose of this paper is to establish a correlation between the formal behaviour of two Chinese morphemes, shi and you and their functions. We show that when these morphemes (that are usually considered the equivalents of the French “être” and “avoir” respectively) are obligatory in the sentence, each may fulfil one of two separate syntactic roles. But, in cases where shi or you are not obligatory and hence not used for syntactic functions, they play a prominent role in structuring the information, functioning as sentence elements or “utterance auxiliaries”. Further, we try to show that in Chinese, functions relating to the structure of information have different formal manifestations-within and beyond the sentence level.