It-Clefts

Empirical and Theoretical Surveys and Advances

Caterina Bonan, Adam Ledgeway, Caterina Bonan, Adam Ledgeway

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9783110734249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Clefts are intricate objects which, starting with Jespersen (1937), have motivated much work in descriptive and formal linguistics. Nonetheless, almost a century later their exact internal structure and status are still widely debated, therefore a multidisciplinary volume on this theoretically complex structure across different languages of the world is greatly needed.

The articles featured in this volume follow an in-depth Introduction written by the editors, in which we offer a survey of the state-of-the-art on clefts by way of a strong contextualisation to the volume, including a number of robust empirical observations on the morphosyntactic and interpretational properties of these structures in numerous standard and non-standard Romance varieties, as well as a critical presentation of the contributions included in the volume.

Among other things, the ten selected articles propose new insights into the widely-reported interpretational asymmetry between subject and object clefts, the features involved in their derivation, the ways in which the low and high peripheries are variously exploited in the derivation, the morphosyntactic and interpretational differences between clefts and their non-cleft counterparts, the role and formal properties of the copula, the notion of sub-extraction of features, a reconsideration of the very notion of focus via clefting, and much more.

The volume, written by renown experts, offers an in-depth overview of the structure of it-clefts, taking into account different and complementary fields of the study of linguistics (cartography, quantitative methods, experimental investigations, nanosyntax, typology and dialectology) and robust empirical data from numerous languages including Romance varieties, Hungarian, Mandarin Chinese, and two Spanish- and French-lexifier creoles.

Our belief is that the synchrony of clefts will only be appropriately understood once diachronic, typological, historical, experimental and dialectological aspects are all brought together. We offer through this volume a first attempt at providing such a variegated picture of the cross-linguistic morphosyntax of it-clefts.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• It-clefts: State-of-the-art, and some empirical challenges
• 1 Cleft wh-questions as biclausal structures A comparison with simple wh-questions, cleft declaratives, and focalizations
• 2 What is it that requires or constrains clefts? (Dis)Favouring factors for clefting in Germanic and Romance
• 3 Subject versus object clefts: A fresh perspective on a robust asymmetry Insights from French answering strategies
• 4 Making the case for distinguishing information structure from specification in English it-clefts
• 5 The emergence and early development of c’est ‘it is’ clefts in French L1
• 6 Distributed computational models of intervention effects: A study on cleft structures in French
• 7 It-cleft constructions in Réunion Creole
• 8 (It-)clefts in Palenquero Creole and the specificational copula
• 9 A cartographic approach to Chinese V de O clefts
• Index