Article published in:
Language Variation – European perspectives II: Selected papers from the 4th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 4), Nicosia, June 2007
Edited by Stavroula Tsiplakou, Marilena Karyolemou and Pavlos Pavlou
[Studies in Language Variation 5] 2009
► pp. 13–26

Clefts in Cypriot Greek

| University of Cyprus
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.
Published online: 19 November 2009
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.5.02ago