Verum shi, sentence-final de and the emphatic effects in Mandarin

•Shi and de share the same core semantics of being verum operators.•They indicate the speaker’s certainty towards updating the prejacent into the CG.•They differ in discourse licensing conditions.•Shi is defined iff there is a salient or hinted p in the previous discourse.•De is defined if the QUD is a yes–no question about p. In this paper, we examine the semantics of two types of constructions in Mandarin that are widely believed to realize the emphatic effects, namely, verum shi and sentence-final de. It aims to address three crucial questions: (i) what are the emphatic effects that shi and de convey? (ii) Where do these emphatic effects originate from? (iii) How should the semantics of sentences with shi and de be analyzed respectively? Based on an experiment investigating the discourse licensing conditions of these two constructions, it is argued that (i) both shi and de are overt realizations of the verum operator according to Romero & Han (2004) and Romero (2015) but they differ in their discourse licensing conditions; (ii) verum shi can only be licensed by affirmative contexts and positive biased yes–no questions, whereas sentence-final de can be licensed by affirmative, corrective, positive biased, negative biased and neutral yes–no questions; and therefore, (iii) [shi p] is defined if and only if there is a contextually salient or hinted p (p is its prejacent) in the previous discourse whereas [de p] only calls for a yes–no question about the truth value of p. The current analysis offers not only an explanation of the complex patterns observed but also sheds light on the analyses of the emphatic effects associated with other constructions.