It-Clefts and Wh-clefts: two awkward sentence types

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine two constructions, It-Cleft Sentences (e.g. It is me who/that wrote the book) and Wh-Cleft Sentences (e.g. The one who wrote the book is me), which constitute a problematic area of contemporary research in grammar. It-Cleft Sentences and Wh-Cleft Sentences (henceforth ICS and WCS, respectively) appear in a number of languages which are typologically different from each other, and have some, but not all, of their characteristics in common. In Malayalam, for example, in the configuration of the ICS, S¯ is not recognizable: cf. Mohanan, 1978. Both ICS and WCS are present in many European languages (although ICS seem to have a more limited geographic distribution) and in Chinese. In the Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew) only the WCS type occurs. The present paper will deal mainly with English constructions and will also present, at the syntactic level, a comparative analysis between the constructions in English and the corresponding constructions in the Romance languages (French, Italian and Spanish). This comparison is useful in that it allows us to study the existence of a field of variability in the syntactic properties characterizing the way these types of sentences are realized in European languages.

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