The origins of the informative-presupposition it-cleft

Abstract

Prince (1978) identified two functionally distinct classes of it-cleft: the stressed focus (SF) and the informative-presupposition (IP) it-cleft. While the SF it-cleft marks an open proposition as Chafe-given, the clause of the IP it-cleft conveys information which is new in the discourse and possibly unknown to the reader. The origins of this distinction have not previously been discussed, and offer an interesting problem in diachronic pragmatics. In this paper, I bring to bear facts gathered from a corpus-based investigation of the history of the it-cleft. The IP it-cleft is shown to be a Late Middle English innovation, arising from the convergence of several cleft and cleft-like copular constructions, all of which historically allowed new information in the complement.