It-Clefts: Empirical and Theoretical Surveys and Advances

Published by De Gruyter Mouton 2024

It-Clefts

Empirical and Theoretical Surveys and Advances

Edited by: Caterina Bonan and Adam Ledgeway

Volume 362 in the series Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110734140

Overview
Contents

About this book

Clefts are intricate objects which, starting with Jespersen (1937), have motivated much work in descriptive and formal linguistics. Nonetheless, almost a century later their exact internal structure and status are still widely debated, therefore a multidisciplinary volume on this theoretically complex structure across different languages of the world is greatly needed.

The articles featured in this volume follow an in-depth Introduction written by the editors, in which we offer a survey of the state-of-the-art on clefts by way of a strong contextualisation to the volume, including a number of robust empirical observations on the morphosyntactic and interpretational properties of these structures in numerous standard and non-standard Romance varieties, as well as a critical presentation of the contributions included in the volume.

Among other things, the ten selected articles propose new insights into the widely-reported interpretational asymmetry between subject and object clefts, the features involved in their derivation, the ways in which the low and high peripheries are variously exploited in the derivation, the morphosyntactic and interpretational differences between clefts and their non-cleft counterparts, the role and formal properties of the copula, the notion of sub-extraction of features, a reconsideration of the very notion of focus via clefting, and much more.

The volume, written by renown experts, offers an in-depth overview of the structure of it-clefts, taking into account different and complementary fields of the study of linguistics (cartography, quantitative methods, experimental investigations, nanosyntax, typology and dialectology) and robust empirical data from numerous languages including Romance varieties, Hungarian, Mandarin Chinese, and two Spanish- and French-lexifier creoles.

Our belief is that the synchrony of clefts will only be appropriately understood once diachronic, typological, historical, experimental and dialectological aspects are all brought together. We offer through this volume a first attempt at providing such a variegated picture of the cross-linguistic morphosyntax of it-clefts.

cross-linguistic overview of it-clefts
variety of theoretical approaches
strong focus on Romance variation

Author / Editor information

Caterina Bonan & Adam Ledgeway, Cambridge, UK.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	V
It-clefts: State-of-the-art, and some empirical challenges Caterina Bonan and Adam Ledgeway Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 Cleft wh-questions as biclausal structures A comparison with simple wh-questions, cleft declaratives, and focalizations Anna Cardinaletti Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	11
2 What is it that requires or constrains clefts? (Dis)Favouring factors for clefting in Germanic and Romance Sabrina Bertollo Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	35
3 Subject versus object clefts: A fresh perspective on a robust asymmetry Insights from French answering strategies Adriana Belletti and Giuliano Bocci Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	81
4 Making the case for distinguishing information structure from specification in English it-clefts Charlotte Bourgoin and Kristin Davidse Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	105
5 The emergence and early development of c’est ‘it is’ clefts in French L1 Karen Lahousse and Morgane Jourdain Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	135
6 Distributed computational models of intervention effects: A study on cleft structures in French Giuseppe Samo and Paola Merlo Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
7 It-cleft constructions in Réunion Creole Alina McLellan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
8 (It-)clefts in Palenquero Creole and the specificational copula Mara Marsella and Laura Tramutoli Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	217
9 A cartographic approach to Chinese V de O clefts Wenli Tang Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	235
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Audience: Scholars and Researchers: Typologists, Formal Syntacticians, Experts in Nanosyntax, and Computational Linguists.
Pages
- Front matter: 6
- Main content: 264
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 15
- Coloured Illustrations: 6
- Tables: 23
Keywords: Clefts; Syntax; Cartography.

eBook

Published: November 20, 2023
ISBN: 9783110734140

Hardcover

Published: November 20, 2023
ISBN: 9783110738605