A multi-level account of cleft constructions in discourse

Journal of English Linguistics, 1997

This is a study into the syntactic, semantic, and communicative properties of cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions in contemporary English. More precisely, it is a corpus-based study of these constructions in Modern British English. The corpora examined are the London-Lund (LL) corpus, comprising 435,000 words of spoken language, and the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) corpus, providing around one million words of written language. Chapter 1 provides a general introduction to the study, while Chapter 2 describes the database used. In Chapter 3, the author defines the classes of pseudo-cleft and cleft sentences. Readers who are familiar with the terms cleft and pseudo-cleft only through general handbooks (e.g., Quirk et al. 1985) will learn that Collins has not only looked at the most elementary types of clefts (it BE... who/that/where, etc.) and pseudo-clefts (Wh-... BE ...) but has included variant forms in his description. I shall return to this below.

Introduction presuppositional There are contexts in which these presuppositions would not survive, such as conditional and modal contexts, but these are not relevant here. This note is intended to further the discussion of the experiments proposed in Delin [1990a] (the Blue Book note preceding this one) by suggesting some possible methods for the investigation. Before going into the methods, however, I should first of all make clear the nature of the phenomena I am interested in, and the reasoning behind the proposed hypotheses. I have argued elsewhere (Delin [1989, 1990a]) that cleft constructions such as those in (1) derive part of their discourse function from the fact that they are . That is, they contain or convey a semantic presupposition that can be predicted from their syntactic form . In this way, all three clefts in (1) (an-cleft, a-cleft, and a reverse-cleft respectively) would be expected to convey a presupposition that can be glossed as (1d): (

2008

Clefts have always been considered to be 'specificational' (specifying a value for a variable). While recognizing that this is basically correct, this article examines the possibility that there might be exceptions to this rule. A first obvious candidate, viz. the proverbial type 'It is a long lane that has no turning', is discarded as not being a genuine cleft. But there do appear to be real exceptions. The type 'Was it an interesting meeting you went to last night?' is pointed out as having a 'predicational' meaning (viz. 'Was the meeting you went to last night interesting?'). An analysis of such sentences reveals that they have characteristics of both predicational and specificational sentences. Other types of clefts, e.g. 'It was certainly no idiot who wrote this', even appear to be purely predicational.

Glossa: a journal of general linguistics

The present paper presents an experiment testing Portuguese-speaking children's comprehension of different types of subject and object clefts-é que clefts, standard clefts and pseudoclefts. We consider previous studies that explain asymmetric difficulties in the comprehension of structures with object A-bar extraction as an effect of featural intervention, and we show that only é que clefts and standard clefts (as opposed to pseudoclefts) involve a configuration justifying intervention along these lines. Featural intervention accounts therefore predict that comprehension asymmetries between subject and object clefts are only found in é que clefts and in standard clefts, but not in pseudoclefts. Our study supports the featural intervention account. In addition, it also supports the claim that different syntactic structures underlie the different types of clefts under analysis: pseudoclefts are distinguished from other clefts for not involving extraction of the clefted constituent in an intervention configuration.

Proceedings of Chicago Linguistics Society, 2013

2016

The author's intention is to explain how the text creates meaning with anomalous word order and to observe the potential of language to build its context of use by the analysis of two structures of marked syntax from a functional perspective, i.e. cleft sentences and reversed pseudo-clefts. Instead of having chosen independent examples coming from a computational corpus, it has been decided to analyse in detail these two structures of thematization in English in the play Sponono, written by the South African writer Alan Paton in 1965 because they are used to highlight action in the play. Due to the recurrent use of these thematization processes in the play we can perceive the feelings and thoughts of the main characters. We can also observe that these structures are used in situations of climax. Systemic Functional Grammar has been chosen as the linguistic framework because this linguistic school studies language in relation to society and analyses the main reasons for choosing...

Published in: Blanco, M.L. & Marín Arrese, J. (eds.) Discourse and Communication: Cognitive and Functional Perspectives. Madrid: Dykinson & Servicio de Publicaciones Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, 209-224., 2010

This paper investigates a variant of the ‘wh’-cleft construction in English illustrated by sentences such as ‘The thing that he loved most of all in the whole world was the sea’, the so called ‘th’-cleft. Following Collins (1991), such construction is considered a type of pseudo-cleft construction because of its formal and functional similarity with the ‘canonical’ pseudo-cleft with a fused relative clause introduced by a ‘wh’-interrogative. The main aim of this study is to examine th-cleft constructions in Modern English, focusing on their main discourse and informational functions. As the evidence presented from the BNC and LLC corpora suggests, th-clefts are a recognisable type of construction in English, although clearly associated with other types of pseudo-cleft. One of the main motivations that the speaker has for selecting a ‘th’-cleft rather than a ‘wh’-cleft is that the former, but not the latter, allows for expansion of the same kind as is found in other NPs occurring in other kinds of clauses, making the ‘th’-cleft a very versatile construction. In terms of discourse functions, both the basic ‘th’-cleft and reversed ‘th’-cleft (including the so called demonstrative ‘th’-clefts) generally provide a basic distribution of the information, signalling explicitly what is taken as background (coming earlier in the sentence) and what is the main communicative point or focus (towards the end). Other important functions in the use of ‘th’-clefts in discourse may be signalling an (explicit or implicit) contrast, introducing a new topic and providing a cohesive link with the previous context. Key words: Th-clefts, pseudo-clefts, English, British National Corpus, London-Lund Corpus

The term cleft is commonly used to describe a syntactic pattern which serves to separate a discourse prominent constituent structurally from the rest of the clause. It is formed by dividing a more elementary clause into two parts. One of the two parts is foregrounded, and the other, backgrounded. The structure is characterized e.g. in English by the presence of a proleptic pronoun (it), a copula (be), and a relative clause (the cleft clause). This process (foregrounding through cleaving) is not limited to Indo-European languages and can be observed in other languages, e.g. Zaar, a Chadic language spoken in Nigeria. However, in this language ‘cleft’ structures do not use a proleptic pronoun (since copulas do not require a subject in Zaar) nor is there any morphological exponent of relativization in the cleft clause. A further morphological reduction of the structure can be observed when the left-dislocation of the foregrounded element is not accompanied by a copula. I propose to examine what characterises these foregrounding structures beyond the formal components defining them in e.g. English or French, and to find a unifying definition that sets it apart from presentational constructions with a plain restrictive relative clause. In the process I argue that this type of syntactic structure is best accounted for within the framework of Universal Dependency Grammar (UD) which only considers content words as governors in dependency relations, thus accounting for the absence of copula. Finally, I present a brief description of copulas in Zaar.

The traditional approaches to the analysis of clefting have generally considered only some of the aspects of cleft constructions, frequenly not being able to account for all the formal and functional properties that they display. To that end, a multidimensional methodology is required to cover and explain all the relevant elements that come into play when speakers make use of this instance of thematized structure. This paper aims to take into consideration the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors that are inherent to clefting which, in combination with some basic notions of discourse analysis, might be able to provide a broad view of its indisputable potential for the analysis of discoursive practices in journalistic texts. More specifically, my thesis focuses on the distribution of information in the different types of clefts, considering the informative progression from new to given in it-clefts in opposition to the reverse order in wh-clefts. I will analyze the implications of the two different informational arrangements by providing evidence from a written corpus, exploring the contribution that the informative progression provides to the potential of clefting as a tool for discourse analysis.

2000

it In this paper, we explore a proposal, rst put forward by Prince [1978], to the e ect that -clefts serve an apparently subordinating function in discourse. In addition to the cause-and-e ect subordination noted by Prince, our own data reveals that clefts are also involved in temporal subordination, where the clefted material appears dissociated from the main time line. Using Scha and Polanyi's [1988] notation, we can draw a local discourse structure that illustrates the general subordination relation involved. However, this does not constitute an explanation of subordination is e ected by -clefts.

2017

This paper draws attention to a robust grammatical change trajectory, here dubbed the copula-to-cleft pathway. We show that the emergence of the copular clause construction tends to lead to the emergence of the cleft construction, and the decline of one tends to be in tandem with the other. We further propose that the above pattern follows from a syntactic treatment that derives the cleft structure from a copular clause. Such copular syntax can be further combined with a semantic analysis where the focus interpretation of clefts is computed based on a copular structure, without resorting to dedicated focus projections.

Journal of Semantics 25. 345-380, 2008

In this paper, we examine two main approaches to the syntax and semantics of it-clefts as in 'It was Ohno who won': an expletive approach where the cleft pronoun is an expletive and the cleft clause bears a direct syntactic or semantic relation to the clefted constituent, and a discontinuous constituent approach where the cleft pronoun has a semantic content and the cleft clause bears a direct syntactic or semantic relation to the cleft pronoun. We argue for an analysis using Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) that captures the best of both approaches. We use Tree-Local Multi-Component Tree Adjoining Grammar (MC-TAG) to propose a syntax of it-clefts and Synchronous Tree Adjoining Grammar (STAG) to define a compositional semantics on the proposed syntax. It will be shown that the distinction TAG makes between the derivation tree and the derived tree, the extended domain of locality characterizing TAG, and the direct syntax-semantics mapping characterizing STAG allow for a simple and straightforward account of the syntax and semantics of it-clefts, capturing the insights and arguments of both the expletive and the discontinuous constituent approaches. Our analysis reduces the syntax and semantics of it-clefts to copular sentences containing definite description subjects, such as 'The person that won is Ohno.' We show that this is a welcome result, as evidenced by the syntactic and semantic similarities between it-clefts and the corresponding copular sentences.

2008