It-Clefts and Wh-clefts: two awkward sentence types

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine two constructions, It-Cleft Sentences (e.g. It is me who/that wrote the book) and Wh-Cleft Sentences (e.g. The one who wrote the book is me), which constitute a problematic area of contemporary research in grammar.It-Cleft Sentences and Wh-Cleft Sentences (henceforth ICS and WCS, respectively) appear in a number of languages which are typologically different from each other, and have some, but not all, of their characteristics in common. In Malayalam, for example, in the configuration of the ICS, S¯ is not recognizable: cf. Mohanan, 1978. Both ICS and WCS are present in many European languages (although ICS seem to have a more limited geographic distribution) and in Chinese. In the Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew) only the WCS type occurs. The present paper will deal mainly with English constructions and will also present, at the syntactic level, a comparative analysis between the constructions in English and the corresponding constructions in the Romance languages (French, Italian and Spanish). This comparison is useful in that it allows us to study the existence of a field of variability in the syntactic properties characterizing the way these types of sentences are realized in European languages.

Cleft constructions in a contrastive perspective

“…Moreover, a more fine-grained account of the functional differences and similarities between Type A, Type B and Type C clefts must be provided. Specifically, while the differences between Type A / B clefts, on the one hand, and Type C clefts, on the other hand, have already been described in numerous studiesand so we thus moved away long ago from the belief that Cleft sentences and Pseudo-cleft sentences are functionally equivalent; crucial studies in this respect are certainly Prince (1978) and Sornicola (1988) -the differences between Type A and Type B clefts are not so evident. In our view, the main evidence showing that there is a difference between Type A and B clefts is the fact that many languages (cf.…”

“…A great number of studies identify two main types of clefts: Cleft sentences and Pseudo-cleft sentences (cf., among many others, the classic studies from Prince 1978;Sornicola 1988;Smits 1989; more recently, see Roggia 2008and Panunzi 2009 on Italian; as well as Valentini 2012 on clefts in Bergamasco, a Gallo-Italian dialect spoken in Northern Italy). Thus, in the first place, the main distinction to be made is between these two types of clefts.…”

Chapter 8. Concealed pseudo-clefts? Evidence from a Lombard dialect

“…Clefts are focus constructions in which the copula introduces a focalised XP (on Italian, see Sornicola 1988;Salvi 1991). Following Belletti 2008, we assume that the XP is extracted from a (small) CP, see (1).…”

De la malléabilité des structures syntaxiques dans l'interaction orale : le cas de la clivée

“…3 De ce fait, les phrases clivées sont souvent analysées ensemble avec les phrases pseudo-clivées (cf. Prince : 1978 ;Sornicola : 1988 ;Collins : 2006) et avec d'autres formats clivés -identifiés surtout dans la langue anglaise -comme les th-clefts (Ball : 1977) et les reversed wh-clefts ou pseudo-clivées renversées (Lambrecht : 2001). Ces constructions ont été décrites avant tout comme des structures syntaxiques " équivalentes " au niveau sémantique, dans le sens qu'elles renverraient toutes à une phrase canonique présumée.…”