Clefting and discourse organization: Comparing Germanic and Romance

Abstract

This contribution studies the translational counterparts of English it-clefts in German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Its empirical basis is EUROPARL, a parallel corpus of European Parliament Proceedings. The overall findings suggest that cleft structures are preserved most often in French and Portuguese, somewhat less often in Italian and Spanish, and only in a fraction of cases in German. The contribution then surveys the literature on motivations for the use of clefts and offers an assessment of their explanatory potential with respect to the data under consideration. It argues that monofunctional characterizations of clefts as focusing devices fail to account for a range of additional discourse functions, which are constrained, but not fully determined, by grammatical properties, and can be conventionalized in language-particular ways.

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