Abstract
This contribution studies cleft sentences in Bergamasco, a Gallo-Italian dialect. Its empirical basis is a collection of 54 fairy tales (Anesa / Rondi 1981) told orally by 26 speakers. Two types of clefts, IT-clefts and WH-clefts, are available in Bergamasco. Their structural properties and their information structure features are described. Typological studies about the use of clefts in discourse (cf. Miller 2006) show that the relation between IT-clefts and contrastive/corrective focalization is very tight. In our data, however, most cleft sentences actually focus a temporal adverbial (e.g. a duration adverbial such as doi noc ‘(for) two nights’ or tace agn ‘(for) many years’) which corresponds to a new information focus. I will show that clefts with duration adverbials as focus phrase are highly grammaticalised in Bergamasco. In discourse these temporal clefts set a temporal frame, i.e. a topic time (cf. Klein 1994), for the subsequent sentence, that is background material subordinate in importance to what follows.
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