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There is an ongoing discussion in the literature whether the series of sentences 'It's not α that did P. α and β did P.' is acceptable or not. Whereas the homogeneity approach in Büring & Križ 2013, Križ 2016, and Križ 2017 predicts these sentences to be unacceptable, the alternative-based approach predicts acceptability depending on the predicate being interpreted distributively or nondistributively (among others, Horn 1981, Velleman et al. 2012, Renans 2016a. We report on three experiments testing the predictions of both types of approaches. These studies provide empirical data that not only bears on these approaches, but also allows us to distinguish between different accounts of cleft exhaustivity that might otherwise make the same predictions. The results of the three studies reported here suggest that the acceptability of clefts depends on the interpretation of the predicate, thereby posing a serious challenge to the homogeneity approach, and contributing to the ongoing discussion on the semantics of it-clefts.

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This paper presents two experimental studies on the exhaustive inference associated with focus-background nà-clefts in Akan (among others, Boadi 1974; Duah 2015; Grubic, Renans & Duah 2019; Titov 2019), with a direct comparison to two recent experiments on German es-clefts employing an identical design (De Veaugh-Geiss et al. 2018). Despite the unforeseen response patterns in Akan in the incremental information-retrieval paradigm used, a post-hoc exploratory analysis reveals striking parallels between the two languages. The results are compatible with a unified approach both (i) cross-linguistically between Akan and German; and (ii) cross-sententially between nà-clefts (α nà P, ’It is α who did P’) and definite pseudoclefts, i.e., definite descriptions with identity statements (Nipa no a P ne α , ’The person who did P is α ’) (Boadi 1974; Ofori 2011). Participant variability in (non-)exhaustive interpretations is accounted for with a discourse-pragmatic analysis of cleft exhaustivity (Pollard & Yasavul 2016; De Veaugh-Geiss et al. 2018; Destruel & De Veaugh-Geiss 2018).

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