Clefts in Cypriot Greek

The aim of the paper is to investigate the syntactic and semantic structure of Cypriot Greek clefts. It is argued that the cleft clause denotes an unsaturated proposition. The clefted constituent saturates the missing part of that proposition. The clefted constituent is base-generated adjoined to the cleft clause and is not extracted out of the cleft clause. The impersonal copula is thematically vacuous. It c-selects the cleft clause with the adjoined clefted constituent. Late saturation for the clefted constituent is claimed to induce the focal interpretation of the lefted constituent. It-clefts are set within the more general frame of focusing strategies in Cypriot Greek. These include apparent clause-final foci, preverbal stressed operators and Clitic-Right-Dislocation.