The relevance of cleft constructions

Abstract

It-clefts, wh-clefts, reversed wh-clefts and their non-cleft equivalents are truth-conditionally identical. However, their discourse functions vary considerably. In terms of relevance theory it-clefts and both types of wh-clefts give specific processing instructions to the hearer, i.e., they convey procedural meaning. The highlighted element is presented as foreground information and the relative clause as background information, irrespective of whether either chunk of information is old or new. In non-cleft sentences, the distinction between foreground and background depends on the scope of the sentence focus and is gradual. In the cleft sentences, on the other hand, the syntactic structure distinguishes clearly between foreground and background and it determines the scope of the sentence focus. In this way, cleft constructions help to reduce processing effort and thus add to the relevance of the utterance. This account helps to explain the distribution of it-clefts, wh-clefts and reversed wh-clefts in different varieties of English, e.g., the fact that it-clefts are more frequent than wh-clefts in the written English of the LOB corpus, while wh-clefts are far more frequent than it-clefts in the spoken English of the London-Lund corpus.