It-clefts: State-of-the-art, and some empirical challenges

Abstract

This chapter provides a brief overview of recent research into clefts with a particular focus on it-clefts. In addition to dealing with many of the traditional and ongoing challenges that cleft structures pose for formal description and theoretical analysis, the chapter reviews some new problems of analysis and suggests some future directions of research. This general overview is integrated with a consideration and comparison of a number of the insights that emerge from ­the ­analyses of the chapters contained in this volume.

1 Introduction

Clefts are intricate syntactic objects which, starting with Jespersen (1927), have motivated much work in descriptive and formal linguistics. Nonetheless, almost a century later their exact internal structure and status are still widely debated, which is why we believe that a multi-disciplinary volume on this theoretically complex structure across different languages of the world is greatly needed.

This cooperative work brings together scholars from all over Europe, and aims at providing new insights into these complex structures to help the linguistic community answer some questions that we raise in this introduction and which our contributors outline and discuss throughout the rest of the volume. While we are not able here to answer all possible questions on the distribution and internal structure of clefts in all natural languages, we present new cross-linguistic data, experimental results, and theoretical insights that will hopefully help shape the future of the theory of clefts and, more generally, that of nominal focalisations.

Given the wide array of cleft types attested cross-linguistically (cf. Lambrecht 2001 for a thorough review), the scope of this volume is restricted to the investigation of so-called it-clefts, a variety that has already been widely discussed in Romance but is still remarkably understudied compared to more well-known structures such as non-cleft wh-interrogatives. Conversely, in an attempt to provide as complete a picture as possible, the number of languages and language families covered in the volume is broad and ranges from languages that are well-known in the formal linguistics literature such as English and other Germanic languages, Italian and French, to less studied varieties such as Palanquero and Réunion creoles and Mandarin Chinese. In the interest of completeness, this volume has been conceived as a multi-disciplinary work and includes contributions featuring traditional field-work techniques, corpus-based and experimental studies, computational investigations, as well as studies on L1 acquisition or L2 performance, and much more.

Our hope is that this volume will help the advancement of the theory of clefts and focus, and promote the importance of multi-disciplinary and cross-linguistic investigations in the study of these and many other complex structures.

1.1 It-clefts

It-clefts are widely understood to consist of a higher and an embedded clause. In most attested cases, the higher clause contains a quasi-argumental pronoun (in the sense of Bolinger 1977, Chomsky 1981, a.o.), a copula, and a focused element. ­Conversely, the lower clause displays a relative-like structure and is composed of a relativizer that links the lower clause to the focused element, followed by a proposition that contains the trace of the displaced constituent. This is illustrated in (1) using Spoken French examples.

The relativizer, as will become clear from many of the contributions in this volume, is not compulsory or available in all varieties and when it is, it does not have a specialised form for subjects such as the French qui (‘who’, as opposed to que, for non-subjects) seen in (1).

Clefts can be declarative, as in (1a), or interrogative, as in (1b). The quasi-­argumental pronoun, c(e) in the French examples above, does not have a phonological form in all languages. Eastern Trevisan (Veneto)1 as described in Bonan (2021) is an example of language with phonologically silent quasi-­argumental pronouns, as illustrated in (2).

Surprisingly, some languages such as Portuguese, spoken French and Eastern Trevisan also display inverse clefts of the type in (3), where the copula exceptionally follows the focused element (Kato & Ribeiro 2009, Kato 2014, Mioto & Lobo 2016, Bonan 2017, a.o.).