Cleft Constructions Research Articles

Setting subject and the inferential cleft construction in Korean

Abstract This article aims to develop a cognitive-functional analysis of the Korean inferential cleft construction (ICC) by identifying two motivations. It is demonstrated that the ICC must be understood as a mechanism to improve coherence and relevance in the text; it is first and foremost motivated to establish relationships between the preceding context and the event denoted by the subordinate clause headed by kes. By pointing out that attempts to ascertain concrete meanings of the ICC are bound to be futile, we argue that various meanings the ICC exhibits arise by mapping it onto the result phase of the epistemic cycle. The second motivation for the ICC is to put the proposition in the spotlight by indicating that the global circumstances, not the speaker, warrant judgment. Consequently, the speaker staves off the responsibility for her epistemic judgment.

Cleft Constructions in Arabic and English: A Contrastive Study

This paper aims at investigating cleft constructions in both Arabic and English to see how elements and entities of a sentence are connected through many different focus devices. The results reveal that English, as well as Arabic, use different strategies to form focus constructions. In English, for instance, It-cleft and the Wh-cleft constructions are the most frequently used devices for highlighting a certain element. It has been claimed that the underlying structure of the Arabic nominative sentences is the VSO pattern from which fronting or topicalization is used as a process of highlighting a certain element in the sentence. It has been further claimed that focus constructions in Arabic can be achieved by further devices like the particle [Ɂinna] and the pronouns of separation. Keywords: It-cleft, Wh-cleft, focus, Arabic.

Interactive structure building in sentence production

How speakers sequence words and phrases remains a central question in cognitive psychology. Here we focused on understanding the representations and processes that underlie structural priming, the speaker’s tendency to repeat sentence structures encountered earlier. Verb repetition from the prime to the target led to a stronger tendency to produce locative variants of the spray-load alternation following locative primes (e.g., load the boxes into the van) than following with primes (e.g., load the van with the boxes). These structural variants had the same constituent structure, ruling out abstract syntactic structure as the source of the verb boost effect. Furthermore, using cleft constructions (e.g., What the assistant loaded into the lift was the equipment), we found that the thematic role order (thematic role-position mappings) of the prime can persist separately from its argument structure (thematic role-syntactic function mappings). Moreover, both priming effects were enhanced by verb repetition and interacted with each other when the construction of the prime was also repeated in the target. These findings are incompatible with the traditional staged model of grammatical encoding, which postulates the independence of abstract syntax from thematic role information. We propose the interactive structure-building account, according to which speakers build a sentence structure by choosing a thematic role order and argument structure interactively based on their prior co-occurrence together with other structurally relevant information such as verbs and constructions.

The contact-based emergence of the subject-focus construction in Wolof

Abstract In this article, we focus on the origin of the Wolof subject-focus construction (SFC) from a dynamic perspective. In Wolof, argument focus is expressed morpho-syntactically by means of copulaless cleft constructions consisting of the juxtaposition of the focus and a free relative clause. The free relative clause is headed by a determiner, which takes the form a in the case of the SFC. The determiner a is not found anywhere else in the language outside of SFC. We hypothesise that Wolof borrowed its SFC from Berber languages. The sociohistorical scenario, based on oral tradition, could have been the emergence of Wolof, as a crucible of contact between peoples of diverse origin including Berber groups. This finding is strengthened by the occurrence of other elements common to Wolof and Berber languages, such as clitic attraction, negation, copula insertion, as well as a number of lexical parallelisms.

The Wolof argument-focus constructions as copulaless clefts

Abstract In Wolof (Niger-Congo), focus is expressed morphosyntactically via specific focus constructions. This article deals with two of them, namely the subject-focus and the complement-focus constructions. I propose to analyse them as copulaless cleft constructions of the form focus | topic, that is, constructions in which the focus and the topic are juxtaposed. In such clefts, the topic of the sentence is expressed by means of a noun phrase which is headed by the definite article la when the focus corresponds to the syntactic object, and by the morpheme a when the focus corresponds to the syntactic subject of the sentence.

Exploring English Information Packaging Constructions in Written and Spoken Language

Information structure refers to the relationship between sentence properties and the surrounding discourse: the legitimacy of the sentences may depend on what has been established by the immediately preceding sentences or phrases in the written and spoken language. Passive clauses, extraposition, the existential construction, the 'it'-cleft construction, pseudo-clefts, dislocation, and pre- and post-posing are described as non-canonical constructions. The paper is to characterize the syntactic differences between these constructions and their basic counterparts and to investigate the factors that encourage or discourage the use of one of these constructions as opposed to the more basic counterpart

Grammatical Knowledge of English Cleft Constructions among Pakistani ESL Learners across L2 Proficiency Levels and Learning Styles

Grammatical Knowledge of English Cleft Constructions among Pakistani ESL Learners across L2 Proficiency Levels and Learning Styles

Negative structures in neo-standard Italian: non è che (‘it is not that’) + S and mica (‘a crumb’) in comparison

Abstract In 1994, in a thought-provoking paper focusing on the developments emerging in the renewed standard variety of Italian, Monica Berretta formulated a few previsions concerning the future admittance into the norm of a number of traits, in her own words, “features, or better, clusters of features that, in today’s Italian, appear more likely to succeed in establishing themselves in the ongoing process of language change, since they are both co-occurrent and typologically coherent [my translation]”. Those features included the incipient emergence of three negative constructions: i) a construction involving the negative operator mica (< Latin ‘crumb’), either in post-verbal position without a pre-verbal negative marker (e.g. Sono mica scemo ‘I am not a fool’) or ii) in pre-verbal position (e.g. Mica sono scemo ‘I am not a fool’) and iii) a sentential negation entailing the cleft construction non è che (‘it is not that’) + S (e.g. Questo intervento non è che c’entri molto con il programma del congresso… ‘It is not that this proposal is particularly relevant to the conference’s theme…’), which Berretta considered to be favoured in prognostic terms. In this paper, the occurrences of negative constructions within the KIParla corpus will be compared with the corresponding occurrences in a thirty-hour corpus extracted from the Teche Rai data base [www.teche.rai.it], dating back to the 60s, 70s and 80s of the twentieth century. It will be argued that the cleft construction non è che + S has hitherto prevailed at the expense of the others (involving the use of the negative operator mica), that have specialised to express a few distinctive pragmatic and discursive functions.

Processing of linguistic focus depends on contrastive alternatives

Readers progressed through a sentence in the Maze task (Forster et al., 2009), deciding at each word between a sensical and a non-sensical continuation. Contexts presented before these sentences manipulated whether words were linguistically focused and whether they were given or new (Experiment 1); focused targets were read more slowly even when they were given, and new targets were read slowly in general. This both replicated earlier results in which slowdowns were found in the reading of focus (Benatar and Clifton, 2014; Birch and Rayner, 1997; Lowder and Gordon, 2015), and demonstrated that focus slowdowns are not reducible to newness. To clarify earlier results in which speed-ups were found on focused words (Birch and Rayner, 2010; Morris and Folk, 1998), contexts manipulated whether contrastive alternatives to focused words were presented with a focus particle (Experiment 2) or in a cleft construction (Experiment 3). Focused targets were read less slowly when a contrastive alternative was present in the context. This effect of contrastive alternatives cannot be reduced to simple semantic associate priming: Contexts also manipulated whether a semantically associated expression was present independently of the presence of a contrastive alternative (Experiment 4). Readers slowed down less when an alternative was present in the context, even when this alternative was not semantically associated to the target. These results indicate that the processing of focus depends on contrastive alternatives, in their interaction with newness, semantic association, and focus construction.

The Factive, IHRC, and Cleft constructions in Korean

Abstract This article aims to develop a Cognitive Grammar (CG) analysis of three grammatical constructions in Korean, all of which employ the bound noun kes. The data under examination includes the Factive, Internally Headed Relative Clause (IHRC), and Cleft constructions. We propose a uniform treatment of the three types of kes by arguing that it denotes a schematic noun that profiles a thing (noun) and has some role in the process of the adnominal clause. Different interpretations of these constructions arise due to different types of conceptualizations involved in each instance. In so doing, we point out that previous proposals that deal with kes are neither general enough to capture the commonalities observed in all three constructions nor can account for the new observations we present.

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

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.

Verg. Aen. 9. 427: A linguist’s perspective

This article offers a linguistic commentary on the verse Verg. Aen. 9. 427 me, me, adsum qui feci, in me conuertite ferrum, in which the personal pronoun in the accusative needs interpretation. Since the time of Servius and Donatus, the opinions of commentators have been divided. Servius and his followers believe that the pronoun in the accusative is a direct complement that depends on an implied (omitted) verb like interficite, occidite, or petite, and consider this place as a rhetorical figure of aposiopesis. Donatus, on the other hand, argues that the accusative me, me is independent, while discontinuous intonation with which the whole verse must be uttered emphasizes the extreme degree of despair of Nisus, who cannot prevent the death of his beloved friend Euryalus. A review of the commentaries on the Aeneid shows that there are slightly more supporters of Donatus’ hypothesis than that of Servius’, but all of their reasoning is intuitive and does not explain why it is the syntactically independent accusative that gives the agitated sounding to Nisus’ last words. The author of the article applies the pragmatic approach to the interpretation of this place, analyzing similar examples of “non-syntactic” use of the accusative and considering both traditional and modern views on this phenomenon. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion that the verse under consideration corresponds to what in modern linguistics is called “cleft construction”. Such constructions exist in different languages and serve to express the focus of contrast. At the end of the study, the author attempts to answer the question of why Latin employs the accusative as a tool to express intense emotions.

현대중국어 ‘是…的’ 분열구문과 ‘是’ 초점구문의 정보구조 대조 분석

Through corpus-based and theoretical analysis, it can be confirmed that the cleft construction ‘Shi…De’ has more restrictions than the focus construction with ‘Shi’. First, the cleft construction is used only for past events, whereas the focus construction can be used for past, present and future events. Second, in terms of information structure, the argument that follows the focus marker ‘Shi’ always functions as a unique focus in a cleft construction, while a focus construction with ‘Shi’ can have an argument-focus structure, a predicate-focus structure, or a sentence-focus structure. Third, an indefinite noun phrase cannot follow a verb in a cleft construction, but it can follow a verb in the focus construction with ‘Shi’. Fourth, there are restrictions on the situational types of verbs used in the cleft construction, but there are few restrictions on those of verbs in the focus construction with ‘Shi’. This study shows that the pragmatic functions of the cleft construction and the focus construction are totally different, and the view that the information structure of the two constructions is the same is not appropriate.

Canonicity Effect on Sentence Processing of Persian-speaking Broca's Patients.

Fundamental notions of mapping hypothesis and canonicity were scrutinized in Persian-speaking aphasics. To this end, the performance of four age-, education-, and gender matched Persian-speaking Broca's patients and eight matched healthy controls in diverse complex structures were compared via the conduction of two tasks of syntactic comprehension and grammaticality judgment. The tested structures included subject agentive, agentive passive, object experience, subject experience, subject cleft, and object cleft constructions. Our results, while corroborating the predictions of the mapping hypothesis, showed that in structures, in which linguistic elements were substituted and dislocated out of their canonical syntactic positions, namely, agentive passive, subject experiencer, object experiencer, and object cleft constructions, Broca's problems escalated. In contrast, in those structures whose constituent concatenations were aligned with canonical syntactic structures, namely subject agentive, and cleft structures, patients had above the chance performance. Ultimately, the theoretical and clinical implications of the study were discussed. The number of predicates in a sentence, predicate types (psychological and agentive), as well as semantic heuristics and canonicity all by all could be regarded as the major culprits for aphasics' poor performance.

말뭉치 자료에 근거한 ‘是…的’ 분열구문의 유형과 동사의 상황유형 고찰

Based on the corpus data, this paper analyzed various focus constructions of the cleft sentence ‘Shi…De’. The cleft sentences extracted from corpus data are classified into three major types as ‘O+Shi+XP+VP’, ‘S+Shi+XP+VP’, and ‘Shi+XP+VP’. According to the results of this analysis, the verbs with stronger feature of telicity and weaker feature of duration, can appear more freely in the cleft construction. In other words, the factors affecting the interpretation of the sentence with ‘Shi…De’ as a cleft construction are the two features, telicity and duration of the verbs. When a verb contains the feature of [+telic], it means that the internal structure of the verb necessarily includes a natural endpoint. The actions that these verbs mean are likely to be recognized as individual events. Therefore, when a telic verb appears in the form of ‘Shi…De’, it is always easily recognized as a single event that occurred in the past. On the other hand, when a verb contains the feature of [-telic], it does not include a natural endpoint, and except for non-durative active verbs that have no feature of duration, all include a certain duration section. The action that these verbs mean is not a single event, but is more likely to be recognized as a repetitive and habitual event. Therefore, the more durative feature a verb have, the more restricted the sentences is in its interpretation as a cleft construction.

Constructions clivées en arménien moderne

As in French or English, cleft constructions in Modern Armenian are biclausal constructions with a matrix clause and a relative-like clause, with an identificational clause as a matrix clause headed by a copula (in present or past), while in the relative-like clause introduced by the main subordinator, the relativised argument is coindexed with the argument of the copula. Typologically, cleft constructions are considered typical of languages with rigid word order; however, they are common in Modern Armenian, a language with flexible word order. It is argued that the intensity of focalisation depends on the strategy used, with simple prosody marking associated with the lowest level of intensity, and preverbal position and clefts associated with intermediate and high-intensity focalisation respectively. The existence of cleft-like constructions in Classical Armenian and both Modern Armenian standards is argued to be evidence of diachronic continuity and a possible grammaticalization path from cleft constructions to the auxiliary movement focus strategy.

The development of the Chinese VdeO cleft construction

AbstractThis paper addresses the development of the Chinese VdeO cleft construction, and how the cleft constructional network was developed in the history of Chinese. It is argued that VdeO clefts emerged in the 13th century which was about 300 years later than VPdeclefts. A key factor in their development is the use in Middle Chinese of relative clause in post-copula position. We argue that the emergence of VdeO clefts also involved analogization to the extant VPdeclefts as well as deferred equatives. Once VdeO clefts occurred, they were recruited into the cleft network as a subschema, resulting in the schematic network being augmented and expanded. This study is a contribution to the developing field of constructionalization by making more explicit the way how nodes are created in a constructional network and how the network is reorganized and expanded.

Towards the copular status of clefts—Evidence from diachrony

Abstract This paper draws attention to a robust grammatical change trajectory, here dubbed the copula-to-cleft pathway. We show that the emergence of the copular clause construction tends to lead to the emergence of the cleft construction, and the decline of one tends to be in tandem with the other. We further propose that the above pattern follows from a syntactic treatment that derives the cleft structure from a copular clause. Such copular syntax can be further combined with a semantic analysis where the focus interpretation of clefts is computed based on a copular structure.

The focus system in Hadiyya

Abstract This study identifies, analyses and describes the devices and functions of focus in information structuring in Hadiyya, a Highland East Cushitic language. Data, which were collected from native speakers, were dealt with based on the theory of Functional Grammar (Dik 1997). For focalization, the language uses morphological, lexical and syntactic means. The latter involves word-order change and cleft construction (including pseudo-cleft). Comparatively, the morphological mechanism is the most dynamic and frequent in use while the lexical means is limited both in the number of items employed and in frequency of occurrence.

Pseudo-relatives and restrictive-relatives in child Mandarin.

This study investigated why object-gap relative clauses (RCs) are dominant in early child Mandarin. We discuss how restrictive-RCs differ from pseudo-RCs syntactically and pragmatically, and examine how these two types of RCs are distributed in the RC utterances of ten children and their caregivers. The results showed that (a) Mandarin-speaking children produce many more pseudo-RCs than restrictive-RCs, (b) restrictive-RCs exhibit a subject-gap advantage and are dominantly headed, and (c) pseudo-RCs exhibit an object-gap advantage and are dominantly headless. We propose that the development of restrictive-RCs is mainly influenced by the structural factor, and that the extensive use of pseudo-RCs is attributed to the communicative needs of young children. Our findings also suggest that young children's pseudo-RCs tend to have a subject-focus reading, and the object-gap dominance observed in the pseudo-RCs of child Mandarin is related to the head-final RCs and the special structural features of the cleft construction in Mandarin.