Establishing a pseudo-cleft construction in Japanese: A perspective from everyday conversation

Abstract

It has been well established that Japanese has one type of cleft construction. This understanding was reached mostly through the examination of single Japanese sentences, constructed based on (pseudo-)cleft examples in English. We identify another type of cleft in Japanese based on the examination of everyday conversation data. This construction can be aptly considered a pseudo-cleft as it involves the interrogative pronoun nani ‘what’. Both structurally and functionally, it behaves similarly to pseudo-clefts in several other languages and to the Japanese traditional cleft, as characterized in recent conversation-based studies.