Uses of 是 before verbs

[Guest realmayo]

Okay, point taken, I should have written:

 

So to answer the OP, I would repeat that I don't think these are necessarily examples of “shì …de” used for emphasis or indeed for drawing particular focus onto a word to highlight contrast.

 

But I still suspect that in the examples given earlier, 是 is being incorrectly straightjacketed into the "classic" construction (which usually has stress falling on the word to which attention is being drawn).

[Guest123]

 

我是昨天来的。  I came yesterday.  It was yesterday that I came.

我是明天来。      I am coming tomorrow.  It'll be tomorrow that I come.

These two sentences in fact are very different, inspite of their apparent similarity.

In the first one 是……的 contruction describes a situation resulting from a previous action: I'm here because I've arrived yesterday.

In the second 是 is used to make accent on the fact that I am coming tomorrow, and not any other day.

[陳德聰]

@realmayo Perhaps you've mistaken me for tooironic. I do not agree that this is a permutation of the 是...的 structure at all. In fact I think I only commented on the work that 是 does in these sentences. I also mentioned that the examples include different uses of 是 that can't all be ascribed to the same sense of 是.