Towards a taxonomy of Latin cleft sentences

Abstract

Cleft sentences are a well-known structure in most of the languages of Europe: in many grammatical accounts they appear as a Focus-marking device, but in some cases they may also show additional functions. However, the issue of a Latin counterpart, if not a Latin ancestor, has seldom been addressed after Bengt Löfstedt's path-breaking article. Building on recent studies on information structure, a corpus study has been carried out, that demonstrates not only that Latin could mark an argument-focus using a cleft, but also that this sentence evolved by developing different informational values through grammaticalization.