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Introduction published In:
Non-prototypical clefts
Edited by Lena Karssenberg, Karen Lahousse, Béatrice Lamiroy, Stefania Marzo and Ana Drobnjakovic
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 32] 2018
► pp. 1–20
Introduction

Non-prototypical clefts

Formal, semantic and information-structural properties

| KU Leuven
| KU Leuven
| KU Leuven
| KU Leuven
| KU Leuven

In this article we present an overview of current debates in the analysis of cleft sentences. The types of sentences that are often seen as prototypical examples of the cleft category are introduced by it is or a cross-linguistic equivalent; in addition, they have specificational semantics and a focus-background information structure articulation. We argue here that other, less prototypical types of constructions, which have received less attention, also belong to the cleft category: sentences that are introduced by expressions such as there is and you’ve got (and their cross-linguistic equivalents), as well as sentences introduced by it is which do not have specificational semantics and which express other types of information structure articulations (e.g. all-focus or topic-comment). We argue that it is fruitful to analyse these ‘non-prototypical’ clefts in more depth, not only to come to a better understanding about these sentence types in their own right, but also to arrive at insights in the phenomenon of ‘clefts’ in general.

Keywords: non-prototypical, cleft sentences, information structure, existential sentences, presentational sentences, there cleft
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Prototypical clefts and their properties
  • 3.Non-prototypical information structure articulation of clefts
  • 4.Enlarging the category: Non-prototypical cleft introducers
  • 5.Contributions in this volume
    • 5.1Introduction
    • 5.2Different formal types of non-prototypical clefts
    • 5.3Theoretical and methodological background
    • 5.4The role of information structure
    • 5.5Main claims and results
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 January 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00014.kar
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