Form and frequency of Italian Cleft constructions in a corpus of electronic news

Cesare, Anna-Maria De; Garassino, Davide; Marco, Rocío Agar; Baranzini, Laura

doi:10.1515/9783110361872.49

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 8 publications

(14 reference statements)

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“…We did not exclude cases of (it-)cleft look-alikes involving restrictive relative clauses from our counts (Cesare et al 2014;Karssenberg 2017). These structures are composed of a presented "clefted" XP, as given in (6) for Italian, followed by a restrictive relative clause (Karssenberg & Lahousse 2018: 516).…”

Section: Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intervention effects in clefts: a study in quantitative computational syntax

Samo

Merlo

2021

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Clefts structures show an important asymmetry in interpretation: subject clefts can provide both corrective or new information foci, while non-subjects (objects, adjuncts) are only corrective. According to Belletti (2015), such an asymmetry arises from the fact that movement deriving subject clefts can target two focus positions, but non-subjects can target only one. In both cases a long-distance dependency is created, triggering locality effects. In this paper, we show that intervention effects causing ungrammaticality in certain configurations give rise to lower-than-expected frequencies in corresponding grammatical configurations. Based on sets of features that play a role in the syntactic computation of locality, we compare the theoretically expected and the actually observed counts of features in a corpus of thirteen syntactically annotated treebanks for three languages (English, French, Italian). We find the quantitative effects predicted by the theory of intervention locality. First, subject clefts, where no intervention is at play, are more frequent than object clefts, where intervention is at play. Secondly, object clefts are less frequent than expected in intervention configuration, while subject clefts are roughly as frequent as expected. Finally, we also find that the differential and direction of difference between expected and observed counts is directly proportional to the number of features that establish the intervention, the strength of the intervention. These results provide a three-fold contribution. First, they extend the empirical evidence in favour of the intervention theory of locality. Second, they provide theory-driven quantitative evidence, thus extending in a novel way the sources of evidence used to adjudicate theories. Finally, the paper provides a blueprint for future theory-driven quantitative investigations.

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Section: Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intervention effects in clefts: a study in quantitative computational syntax

Samo

Merlo

2021

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Non-prototypical clefts

Karssenberg

Lahousse

Lamiroy

et al. 2018

BJL

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In this article we present an overview of current debates in the analysis of cleft sentences. The types of sentences that are often seen as prototypical examples of the cleft category are introduced by it is or a cross-linguistic equivalent; in addition, they have specificational semantics and a focus-background information structure articulation. We argue here that other, less prototypical types of constructions, which have received less attention, also belong to the cleft category: sentences that are introduced by expressions such as there is and you’ve got (and their cross-linguistic equivalents), as well as sentences introduced by it is which do not have specificational semantics and which express other types of information structure articulations (e.g. all-focus or topic-comment). We argue that it is fruitful to analyse these ‘non-prototypical’ clefts in more depth, not only to come to a better understanding about these sentence types in their own right, but also to arrive at insights in the phenomenon of ‘clefts’ in general.

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French adverbial cleft sentences

Cesare

2018

BJL

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The goal of this contribution is to deepen our knowledge of French cleft sentences through the study of a special category of clefts called adverbial clefts. The issues that we will address concern their form, discourse frequency and boundaries with resembling structures. In order to shed light on these issues, we start by defining the concept of adverbial from a morphosyntactic and functional point of view. We then present a corpus-based description of the categories of adverbials that can be cleaved. Finally, we propose a general semantic principle capable of describing and explaining, in a coherent and unitary way, both the data obtained in our empirical study and found in the form of constructed examples in the existing literature. In addition to explaining why certain adverbials can be cleaved while others cannot, this principle also allows for a distinction to be made between two syntactic realizations of the structure ‘c’est Adv que p’, as well as for a solution to the controversial issue of the status of domain adverbials.

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Form and frequency of Italian Cleft constructions in a corpus of electronic news

Cited by 7 publications

References 8 publications

Intervention effects in clefts: a study in quantitative computational syntax

Intervention effects in clefts: a study in quantitative computational syntax

Non-prototypical clefts

French adverbial cleft sentences

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