it -clefts in the meta-informative structure of the utterance in modern and present-day english ana...
TRANSCRIPT
It-clefts in the Meta-Informative Structure of the Utterance in
Modern and Present-Day English
Ana E. Martínez-Insua ([email protected])Javier Pérez-Guerra ([email protected])
Language Variation and Textual Categorisation Research UnitUniversity of Vigo
3e colloque interdisciplinaire internationalUniversité Paris-Sorbonne IV - CELTA
15th-16th November, 2012
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Outline• Background and scope of study:
cleft-sentences and it-clefts• Goal• Description of it-clefts
– MIC-compliant– Structural/grammatical description– Informative description
• Identifying nature– Meta-informative characterisation
• Corpus-based study• Concluding remarks• References
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Background
• ‘cleft’ (already in Jespersen 1909-49: 1937):
(1) What this paper describes is the cleft construction. [basic pseudo-cleft or basic wh-cleft]
(2) The cleft construction is what this paper describes. [reversed or inverted pseudo- or wh-cleft]
(3) It is the cleft construction that this paper describes.[cleft or it-cleft]
(4) That is the cleft construction (that) this paper describes.
[th-cleft](5) They are real researchers that tackled this issue.
[pronominal cle“apparent dismemberment of a single sentence entailed in
their derivation” (Delahunty 1982: 5)
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Background
• ‘cleft’ (already in Jespersen 1909-49: 1937):
(1) What this paper describes is the cleft construction. [basic pseudo-cleft or basic wh-cleft]
(2) The cleft construction is what this paper describes. [reversed or inverted pseudo- or wh-cleft]
(3) It is the cleft construction that this paper describes.[cleft or it-cleft]
(4) That is the cleft construction (that) this paper describes.
[th-cleft](5) They are real researchers that tackled this issue.
[pronominal cleft]
“apparent dismemberment of a single sentence entailed in their derivation” (Delahunty 1982: 5)
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Background
• Common features– Formal, semantic and communicative similarities
possibly “same objective information” (Prince 1978: 884)
• Dissimilarities – Pragmatic factors favour the choice of the type of
cleft (Declerck 1988: 209)
– Semantic and informative differences(Traugott 2008: section 3)
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Scope of the study
• it-cleftsIt is the cleft construction that this paper describes
– Global CA: AS it (semantically empty)– Link verb– Local CA (semantically full)– Background: subordinate clause
[ItAS] Global CA [be] [Xi] Local CA (FOCUS) [introducer + [clause ...n.p.i...]]BACKGROUND
Beyond scope:• Wh-clefts: copulative constructions (identifying or
attributive)• Th-clefts and pronominal-clefts: nonrestrictive
relativisation or even right dislocation
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Goal
Twofold:
• Profile the it-cleft construction from a Meta-Informative Centering Theory (MIC) perspective: – focalising strategy
• Corpus-based analysis of its quantitative and qualitative spread in the recent history of English
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it-clefts: MIC-compliant representation
It is the cleft construction that this paper describes
• Global CA = AS it: expletive and semantically empty
• Link verb• Local CA: focalised semantically full
constituent• Background (vs. the focus expressed in the
cleft part): subordinate clause
[ItAS] Global CA [be] [Xi] Local CA (FOCUS) [introducer + [clause ...n.p.i...]]BACKGROUND
introducer: thatn.p. = null pointer left by the focalisation of one of the constituents
of the clause [Xi]
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it-clefts: MIC-compliant representation
It is the cleft construction that this paper describes
• Assumptions: – Rightmost clause = 2nd-level CA
(Wlodarczyk & Wlodarczyk 2006:8)
– it-cleft = link construction
– Linking of two (2nd-level) CAs (i.e. focus and background) by means of a syntactic design governed by an almost semantically bleached linking verbal operator
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it-clefts: structural & grammatical description
• Local CA ([X]) and null pointer (n.p.) are coreferring
X must materialise an entity (have a referent)(Givón 1984: 731)
It is always expensive what Cambridge University Press sellsnot cleft, but - extraposition of the Subject what Cambridge University
Press sells
- filling of the empty Global CA slot with the AS it
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it-clefts: structural & grammatical description
• ‘introducer’:– Ø (Visser’s 1970: Chapter I apo koinou)– that– who – or which
vs.• what, when (Declerck 1997) or where
extraposed headless relative clauses or pseudo-clefts (Delahunty 1982: 268ff, Ball 1994: 181):It is phrase-markers what I drew on the blackboard[What I drew on the blackboard is phrase-markers]vs.It is phrase-markers that I drew on the blackboard[*That I drew on the blackboard is phrase-markers]
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it-clefts: structural & grammatical description
• functions of null pointer within the rightmost clause (I):
– Global CA:It is a gapi that [[n.p.i] occurs in initial position]
– Local CA:It is {#Ø/ to} me i that [he dedicated the book [n.p.i] ]
– (non-sentence) adverbial:It was with much attention i that [I checked the last proofs of the article [n.p.i] ]
– adverbial complement or obligatory adverbial:It is to Boston i that [she went [n.p.i] ]
– prepositional complement of a verb:It is to my article i that [she was referring [n.p.i] ]
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it-clefts: structural & grammatical description
• functions of null pointer within the rightmost clause (II):
– prepositional complement of an adjective:It was about that Ministeri that [the President was angry [n.p.i] ]
– prepositional complement of a noun:It was of Syntactic Structuresi that [he was the writer [n.p.i] ]
– complement of a preposition:That was the doctori [I was speaking to [n.p.i] ]
– predicative complement of the subject or of the object in very special environments:It’s prettyi that [my mother-in-law is [n.p.i], more than anything else ]It’s a teacheri that [he is [n.p.i], not a butcher! ]
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it-clefts: structural & grammatical description
• category of the Local CA:– NP– PP– Adverb Phrase– Particle of a phrasal verb
But– not normally a clause, VP or (non-contrastive) AP
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it-clefts: structural & grammatical description
• rightmost clause: – finite (supposedly a that-clause) – or nonfinite (-ing or infinitive clause):
[Within the United States,] it is Robinson to appear like a Jones. (Gibb:115)
• sentence-initial Anonymous Subject (AS): materialised by dummy or expletive it
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it-clefts: informative description
• Identifying nature: – they specify a value for a variable (Enkvist 1979,
Declerck 1988, Halliday and Matthiessen 2004, Thompson 2004)
– their semantic scheme: ‘x = y’; ‘assign the value y to x’
– the value occupies the Local CA position and the variable occurs in the Global CA position
Notice:
It is always expensive what Cambridge University Press sells[not an it-cleft but an attributive link construction]
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it-clefts: informative description
• Certain indefinite NPs are acceptable in the Local CA of (identifying) clefts thanks to the contrastive content of their modifiers:
Was it an INTERESTING meeting that you went to last night? [–No, it was a BORING meeting...]
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it-clefts: meta-informative characterisation
Meta-informative effects of clefting:• Rearrangement of the topic-comment
structure of the sentence:- the information in the rightmost that-
clause is (presented as) pragmatically presupposed
(Prince 1978, Declerck 1988, Harold 1995: 158)
- the Local CA is focal (Declerck’s ‘stressed-focus’)
“clefted elements (...) express new information and evoke presuppositional sets”
(Enkvist 1979: 151; our italics)
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it-clefts: meta-informative characterisation
Clefts determine pragmatic functions in a meta-informative way
By means of the clefting device: - the that-clause following the Local CA is formally
presented as pragmatically presupposed or given (Engelkamp and Zimmer 1983: 40, Brömser 1984: 330) from the speaker’s viewpoint, even though it may be actually new for the hearer
- a certain (post-be) theme of the discourse is brought forward as the focus of attention (the Local CA)
clefts as meta-informative devices for focus-marking (Rochemont’s 1986 ‘constructional focus construction’)
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it-clefts: corpus-based analysis
• Frequency: not a productive thematic mechanism in the history of English (but important increase from eModE onwards)
Table 1. The corpus (raw data and normalised frequencies [n.f.] per 100,000 words and 1,000 clauses)
Sources: ARCHER, A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760, The Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus of British English
Period words clauses it-clefts n.f./100,000 words
n.f./1,000 clauses
LME: 1420-1500 71,097 4,751 3 4.21 0.63 EModEI: 1500-1570 61,219 3,891 4 6.53 1.02 EModEII: 1570-1640 75,762 5,729 5 6.59 0.87 EModEIII: 1640-1710 62,940 4,360 11 17.47 2.52 LModE: 1710-1900 67,962 6,247 13 19.12 2.08 PDE: 1961 98,007 6,974 36 36.73 5.16 436,987 31,952 72 16.47 2.25
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it-clefts: corpus-based analysis
• Information status:
Table 2. Referentiality of the sentence-final clause
period Referentiality non-ref low-ref ref LME 1 2 EModE 3 8 9 LModE 1 2 10 PDE 4 17 15
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it-clefts: corpus-based analysis
• Information status:
Table 3: Referentiality of the Local CA
period Referentiality non-ref low-ref ref LME 1 1 1 EModE 9 5 6 LModE 7 4 2 PDE 15 8 13
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it-clefts: corpus-based analysis
• Information status:
– Sentence-final clauses are referring or low-referring in the majority of the cases
rejection of end-focus principle//given-before-new principle
Atlas and Levinson 1981: 16, the it-cleft “contravenes the convention that old information precede new information”
– Local CAs are normally non-referring, especially from eModE onwards
it-clefts as focusing meta-informative strategies
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Concluding remarks• MIC-compliant and structural description of
prototypical it-clefts:Global CA in the form of the AS it + link verb + Local CA + nonfinite/finite non-meta-informatively-centered clause (introduced by Ø, that, which or who)
• information conveyed by Local CA is unavailable
focusing meta-informative device, not conditioned by the given-before-
new principle
• recent (statistical) consolidation in English, corroborated quantitatively and qualitatively
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ReferencesAtlas, J. D. and S. C. Levison. 1981. It-clefts, informativeness, and logical form.
In P. Cole ed. Radical pragmatics. New York: Academic, 1-61.
Ball, C. N. 1994. Relative pronouns in it-clefts: the last seven centuries. Language Variation and Change 6: 179-200.
Brömser, B. 1984. Towards a functional description of cleft constructions. Lingua 62: 325-348.
Declerck, R. 1988. Studies on copular sentences, clefts and pseudo-clefts. Leuven: Foris.
Declerck, R. 1997. When-clauses and temporal structure. London. Routledge.
Delahunty, G. P. 1982. Syntax and semantics of English cleft sentences. Bloomington, In.: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Engelkamp, J. and H. D. Zimmer. 1983. Dynamic aspects of language processing. Focus and presupposition. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Enkvist, N. E. 1979. Marked focus: functions and constraints. In S. Greenbaum, G. Leech and J. Svartvik eds. Studies in English linguistics for Randolph Quirk. London: Longman, 134-152.
Halliday, M. A. K. and Ch. M. I. M. Matthiessen. 2004. An introduction to Functional Grammar. Londond: Arnold.
Jespersen, O. 1909-1949. A modern English grammar on historical principles. Vols. I- VII. Heidelberg: Ejnar Munksgaard.
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Lambrecht, K. 2001. A framework for the analysis of cleft constructions. Linguistics 39/3: 463-516.
Prince, E. F. 1978. A comparison of wh-clefts and it-clefts in discourse. Language 54: 883-906.
Rochemont, M. S. 1986. Focus in generative grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Thompson, G. 2004. Introducing Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.
Traugott, E. C. 2008. ‘All that he endeavoured to prove was’: on the emergence of grammatical constructions in dialogual and dialogic contexts. In R. Cooper and R. Kempson eds. Language in flux: dialogue coordination, language variation, change and evolution. London: Kings College Publications, 143-177.
Visser, F. T. 1970. An historical syntax of the English language. Part I: syntactical units with one verb. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Walker, M. A., Joshi, A. K. and E. P. Prince. 1998. Centering in naturally occurring discourse: an overview. In M. A. Walker, A. K. Joshi and E. F. Prince eds. Centering Theory in discourse. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1-28.
Włodarczyk, H. 1999. Les marqueurs de la validation des énoncés en français et polonais. Etudes Cognitives / Studia Kognitywne III (Warszawa, SOW, PAN), 135-162.
Włodarczyk, A. and H. Włodarczyk. 2012, in press. Meta-informative grounding of utterances. In A. Włodarczyk and H. Włodarczyk eds. Discourse coherence in the MIC framework. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
It-clefts in the Meta-Informative Structure of the
Utterance in Modern and Present-Day EnglishAna Elina Martínez-Insua ([email protected])
Javier Pérez-Guerra ([email protected])
Merci beaucoup!