cleft summary
Stephen Wechsler
wechsler at mail.utexas.edu
Fri Feb 2 19:44:17 UTC 2007
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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