cleft summary

[Stephen Wechsler]

Here's a summary of the replies to my query 
regarding clefts and related constructions. 
Thank-you Bob Borsley, Eun-Jung Yoo, Anna 
Feldman, Gosse Bouma, Mary Dalrymple, Ash Asudeh, 
and Lyne Da Sylva, for your responses.

--Steve
--------------

Yoo, Eun-Jung. 2003. Specificational psuedoclefts 
in English. In Proceedings of the 10th 
International Conference on HPSG, 397-416. CSLI 
Publications.
http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/HPSG/4/yoo.pdf

Yoo, Eun-Jung. 2005. Pseudocleft Sentences in 
English, Korean Journal of Linguistics 30.1, 
115-147.

Yoo, Eun-Jung. 2006. Connectivity Effects and 
Questions as Specificational Subjects. Language 
and Information 10.2, 21-45. The Korean Society 
for Language and Information.

Daphna Heller 1999: The Syntax and Semantics of 
Specificational Pseudoclefts in Hebrew. MA 
thesis, Tel Aviv University 
http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/dheller/download/HellerMA1999.pdf

L. van der Beek, 2003, 
<http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/LFG/8/lfg03-toc.html>The 
Dutch cleft constructions, in Miriam Butt and 
Tracy Holloway King (eds.), Proceedings of the 
LFG '03 Conference, CSLI Publications.
<http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/LFG/8/lfg03-toc.html>http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/LFG/8/lfg03-toc.html

See also chapter 2 of her dissertation (see 
<http://irs.ub.rug.nl/ppn/288277333>http://irs.ub.rug.nl/ppn/288277333)

From the LFG Bib:

@inproceedings{VanderBeek03,
  year =         2003,
  title =        "The Dutch it-cleft Constructions",
  author =       "Leonoor van der Beek",
  booktitle =    "The Proceedings of the LFG '03 Conference",
  address =      "University at Albany, State University of New York",
  url =
                  "http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/LFG/8/lfg03.html",
  editor =       "Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King",
}

This paper also has some discussion of clefts:

@inproceedings{Mohanan99,
   year =     1999,
   author =   "Tara Mohanan and K P Mohanan",
   title =    "Two Forms of BE in Malayalam",
   booktitle =    "The Proceedings of the LFG '99 Conference",
   address =  "University of Manchester",
   url =
                   "http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/LFG/4/lfg99.html",
   editor =   "Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King"
}

There was a discussion of clefts on the LFG List a while ago, e.g.:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0311&L=lfg&P=1086

Also, Kris Halvorsen's UT dissertation was on clefts, but I think it was mainly
semantics, not syntax.

---------------
From Lyne Da Sylva:

My thesis in Computational Linguistics (finished 
in 1998) examined, among other constructions in 
the grammar of French, the syntax of clefts and 
pseudo-clefts (clivées et pseudo-clivées). It is 
available (in French only) at the following 
address :
http://www.theses.umontreal.ca/theses/pilote/dasylva/these.pdf

---------------

From: Bob Borsley:

Your Indonesian example looks a bit like Welsh 
clefts, which are of interest to me. Here is an 
example:

Dillad  a   bryniais i
clothes PRT bought   I
"It was the clothes that I bought."

I have glossed 'a' as PART but it occurs in 
relative clauses and so could be gossed as REL. 
One reason these are of interest to me is that 
you get certain person mismatches. The following 
is a relevant example:

Fi mae Gwyn wedi 'i    ddewis/*fy  newis.
I   is Gwyn PERF  3SGM choose  1SG choose
'It's me that Gwyn has chosen.'

When there is a gap following a non-finite verb 
the verb is preceded by an agreeing clitic. The 
important point is that the clitic here is third 
person singular masculine and not first person 
singular. This suggests to me that the initial 
constituent is not a filler but one term of a 
hidden dentity predication. Here is a related 
sentence in which the identity predication is 
explicit:

Fi ydy 'r   un  mae Gwyn wedi 'i    ddewis
I  is   the one is  Gwyn PERF  3SGM choose
'The one that Gwyn has chosen is me.'

---------------
From Ash Asudeh:

Irish has clefts like the Indonesian one below. 
McCloskey calls them 'reduced clefts'. I was 
tangentially interested in them for resumptive 
pronouns, as in the following:

Teach	beag	seascair	a-r		mhair	muid		ann
house	little	snug	COMP-PAST	lived	we		in.it
'It was a snug little house that we lived in.'

They're mentioned briefly with respect to 
resumptive pronouns in his 2002 paper in the 
Epstein and Seely volume (see e.g., example (11)) 
and also in his 1979 Kluwer (Foris?) book.

---------------
From: Helge Dyvik:

I cannot refer to a publication, but the analysis 
provided by our Norwegian LFG grammar can be 
inspected in our web application XLE-web:

http://decentius.aksis.uib.no/logon/xle.xml

(Your web browser needs SVG (Scalable Vector 
Graphics) in order to display the c-structure - 
there is a link to a free download in the 
Documentation in case you need it.)

An example sentence would be:

Det var studentene som løste problemet.
it was the-students who solved the-problem

As you will see from the relevant analysis (the 
first one displayed), we analyze the relative 
clause as a separate constituent of the sentence, 
filling the role of topic (called GVN-TOP for 
'given topic'), while the predicative complement 
(PREDLINK) "studentene" is also functioning as 
FOCUS. Thus, we see the construction as 
grammaticalizing the topic and focus relations. 
The subject of "løste" ('solved') is not 
identified as "studentene" in the f-structure, 
but the identification is captured in our 
semantic representation MRS (Minimal Recursion 
Semantics), which can also be inspected.

---------------




-- 
Stephen Wechsler
Associate Professor
Linguistics Department, University of Texas
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~wechsler/
"Know your boundaries.  Cross them."
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