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Part of
Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond
Edited by Marco García García and Melanie Uth
[Studies in Language Companion Series 201] 2018
► pp. 287–310

Chapter 10
Cleft sentences in the history of French and English

A case of pragmatic borrowing?

| Universität Mannheim
| Universität Stuttgart

This paper addresses the question of whether certain types of cleft constructions found in earlier stages of English can be interpreted as instances of pragmatic borrowing from French. According to Prince (1988) this type of borrowing can be assumed if (i) a syntactic form in the recipient language is construed in an analogous fashion to a syntactic form in the source language; (ii) the discourse functions of the syntactic form in the source language are borrowed and associated with the syntactic form in the recipient language. Based on a corpus study of Anglo-French (AF) and Middle English (ME) we will show that both languages exhibited a number of different types of cleft constructions some of which seem to have had similar, and some seem to have had different functions. By identifying the nature of clefts in AF as being ambiguous between clefts and predicative constructions, we will discuss in how far this ambiguity could be seen as an accelerating factor of contact-induced change leading to pragmatic borrowing into ME.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Language contact in medieval Britain
  • 3.Clefts in French and English
    • 3.1The development of French cleft sentences
    • 3.2Types of cleft sentences in Old and Middle French
    • 3.3The informative presupposition it-cleft in Old English
    • 3.4The pronoun it-cleft in Middle English
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.201.10car
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Uth, Melanie & Marco García García
2018. Chapter 1. Introduction. In Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series, 201], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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