Introduction
Non-prototypical clefts
Formal, semantic and information-structural properties
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.
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
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Cited by (1)
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