Cleft Sentences. Italian-English in contrast

Cleft sentences. Italian-English in contrast Davide Garassino (University of Basle)* 1. Introduction The aim of this contribution is twofold: first, to describe the link between information structure and the discourse functions of Italian and English Cleft sentences (or Type B-I clefts according to the classification proposed by De Cesare in this volume); second, to examine the specific functions displayed by Cleft sentences within journalistic texts in Italian and English. Both goals will be achieved through a corpus-based enquiry. One of the main issues in pursuing a contrastive pragmatic study of clefts is that it relies on an accurate model of information structure. My proposal is based on two distinct but interacting criteria: referential givenness and focus / background, which will be used to identify several types of clefts according to their different information properties. In addition to a qualitative analysis, I will provide quantitative data to show the distribution of different types of clefts in the two languages. Referring to quantitative data while discussing the functions of Cleft sentences, I will also reveal similarities and differences between Italian and English. The quantitative analysis is based on a subcorpus of online journalistic texts derived from the ICOCP corpus (Italian Constituent Order in a Contrastive Perspective. See De Cesare et al. in this volume), which contains two hundred occurrences of clefts (one hundred from the English section and one hundred from the Italian one). In the construction of this subcorpus, I relied on the same basic criteria that inspired the composition of the main corpus, particularly thematic similarities between the Italian and the English subsections, i.e., the presence of equivalent or at least analogous newspaper sections. Moreover, besides “traditional” newspapers, related textual typologies, such as free newspapers and news releases, were considered to obtain a wider (and more representative) perspective on journalistic writing. Consequently, the Italian subsection is composed of the following texts: La Stampa, Il Sole 24 Ore (section: “Italia-Usa”), La Repubblica (sections: “Scienze” and “Tecnologia”) (newspapers), Leggo (free newspaper), and finally Ansa (news agency). In the English subsection, the examined texts are The Guardian, The New York Times, USA Today (newspapers), AM New York (free newspaper), and AP and ATS (news agencies). The structure of the paper is as follows: in section 2, I will provide a brief and informal survey on the main syntactic and semantic properties of Italian and English Cleft sentences. Section 3 presents a detailed analysis of the information structure of clefts (with relevant quantitative information). In section 4, I will discuss the discourse functions associated with different types of Cleft sentences, and in section 5 I will deal with their specific functions, as observed in journalistic texts. In the conclusion, I will give a final assessment of the divergences and similarities between Italian and English Cleft sentences that emerged from both the qualitative and the quantitative analyses. 2. Italian and English Cleft sentences from a descriptive point of view Cleft sentences have attracted the attention of scholars for a considerable amount of time (Jespersen is probably the first linguist to offer both a fine-grained analysis of English clefts and a surprisingly “modern” definition).1 The relation between clefts, shown in examples (1) and (2), and their *

I wish to thank Anna-Maria De Cesare, Iørn Korzen, and Enrico Roggia for their many insightful observations on a preliminary draft of this paper. 1 “A cleaving of a sentence by means of it is [...] serves to single out one particular element of the sentence and very often, by directing attention to it and bringing it, as it were, into focus, to mark a contrast” (Jespersen 1954, 7: 147).

1

monoclausal counterparts, (3) and (4), has also been well recognized in the literature (the English cleft example is from Jespersen 1954, 7: 148): (1)

È la moglie che decide.2

(2)

It is the wife that decides.

(3)

La moglie decide.

(4)

The wife decides.

Although examples (1) to (4) are truth-conditionally equivalent, they nonetheless show some interesting differences: (1) and (2) are specificational copular sentences (for English, see Declerck 1988; Collins 1991; Dikken 2009. For Italian, see Salvi 1991), i.e., sentences in which a value is provided for a variable. Informally, the semantic content of the subordinate in (2) can be represented as the predicate decide(x). The noun phrase the wife is introduced as the argument to which the predicate applies, decide(wife). Furthermore, Cleft sentences such as (1) and (2) convey both the existence presupposition that “there exists somebody who decides”,3 and an exhaustive / exclusive component,4 paraphrasable as “only the wife decides”. Both the existence presupposition and the exhaustive information are not available in sentences (3) and (4). From a superficial5 syntactic point of view, Cleft sentences are constructions consisting of a main clause containing the copula and a cleft clause, which is variously considered a pseudorelative or a restrictive relative clause (see Reeve 2011 for a recent and extensive discussion of English). By abstracting from language-specific features, it is possible to claim from a linear syntactic point of view that English and Italian clefts basically overlap: (5)

È Gianni che ha partecipato alla festa.

2

As far as the Italian examples are concerned, I chose the following modus operandi for their translation: in the couples of exempla ficta, such as (1) and (2), the English sentence is already a direct translation of the Italian one, so that no further translation is required. Otherwise, Italian clefts are always accompanied by a literal translation. In the case of real data from the corpus, I chose to insert the cleft occurrence in a wider context to permit a better appreciation of the discourse context: in such cases, both the clefts and the relevant discourse context are translated into English. 3 To be more precise, we have to distinguish here between local and global existence presuppositions (see Charnavel 2011: 134). The local one is activated at the noun phrase level and in sentences (1) to (4) is triggered by the definite determiner (i.e., there is a wife); the global one is, on the contrary, triggered at the sentence level (i.e., there is somebody that decides) and is conveyed only by examples (1) and (2). 4 I am using here the generic term “component” instead of “presupposition” because the theoretical status of exhaustiveness in Cleft sentences is a hotly debated topic in the literature. For a detailed discussion see Dufter (2009: 95–98). 5 Given the scope of this article (the connection between information structure and discourse-pragmatic functions), I cannot delve into formal syntactic analyses of clefts. However, it is necessary to mention briefly the fundamental contribution of derivational works to our understanding of Cleft sentences. The syntactic derivation of cleft structures, and in particular IT-clefts, has been a hotly debated topic since the early years of the generative enterprise (Akmajian 1970; Higgins 1973; Chomsky 1977). To simplify, it is possible to draw a line between two major approaches in the derivational literature: the extraposition-based analyses (see Akmajian 1970; Percus 1997) and the expletive ones (see Chomsky 1977; É.Kiss 1998). The former approach basically claims that (a) the cleft clause is a right-extraposed adjunct, (b) the (deep) syntactic structure of Cleft sentences and WH-clefts (or Pseudo-clefts) is the same and (c) the cleft pronoun it and the definite description are semantically equivalent (Percus 1997). The main tenets of the expletive analysis are, on the contrary, the expletive nature of the pronoun it (considered a dummy subject) and the syntactic movement of the clefted constituent towards a higher functional projection (identified as a focus phrase, FocP, in É.Kiss 1998). More recent analyses, such as Hedberg (2000) and Reeve (2011), blend aspects of both approaches.

2

Structure: copula + clefted constituent (in Italian elemento scisso) + cleft clause (frase subordinata). (see Frison 1988; Sornicola 1988; Metzeltin 1989, 2010; Berretta 1995; Panunzi 2009, 2011; Roggia 2009). (6)

It is John that attended the party.

Structure: it + copula + clefted constituent + cleft clause (see at least Delin 1992; Biber et al. 1999; Huddleston and Pullum 2002; Gundel 2006, 2008; Huber 2006). The most striking language-specific differences between Italian and English clefts include the following: Italian allows an implicit variant when the clefted constituent is a subject. In such cases, the cleft clause can be formally realized by the complementizer a / ad and an infinitive form. There is however no interpretive difference between (5) and (7) (Frison 1988: 201): (7)

È Gianni ad aver partecipato alla festa. ‘It is Gianni that attended the party’

Furthermore, in Italian when the clefted constituent is a subject noun phrase or pronoun, as in (5), (7), (8), and (9) or an object noun phrase, as in (10), the copula systematically agrees in person and number with it6 (Frison 1988: 211; D’Achille, Proietti, and Viviani 2005: 265): (8)

Sono Gianni e Luca che hanno partecipato alla festa. ‘It is [Lit. are] Gianni and Luca that attended the party’

(9)

Siete voi che avete partecipato alla festa. ‘It is [Lit. are] you that attended the party’

(10) Sono Gianni e Luca che ho invitato alla festa. ‘It is [Lit. are] Gianni and Luca that I invited to the party’

If the clefted constituent is an object pronoun, then two options are available: if the pronoun appears in the nominative form, the copula agrees with it, as in (11). If the pronoun is in the accusative form, the agreement is normally not realized, as in (12) (Metzeltin 1989: 161; Salvi and Vanelli 2004: 312): (11) Sei tu che vogliono. ‘It is [Lit. are] you that they want’ (12) È te che vogliono. ‘It is you that they want’

In English, the pronoun it is always used as an invariant introducer of the construction (not by chance English Cleft sentences are known in the literature as IT-clefts). Moreover, the choice of the complementizer is not restricted to that, as in example (13), but it also includes WH-forms, as in (14), and a zero option (or no-complementizer), as in (15) (this last example is from the ICOCP corpus):7 6

The agreement in gender is also necessary when a past participle is involved (stata ‘been’ in the following example is the feminine form of the past participle of essere ‘to be’): è stata Maria che ha partecipato alla festa, ‘it was Mary that attended the party’. 7 The choice of one of these three options is not random, as shown by Dikken (2009).

3

(13) It is John that attended the party. (14) It is John who attended the party. (15) It is then Ø I saw the clipboard. (guardian.co.uk)

A contrastive syntactic analysis of the two languages can of course be pursued more deeply, as shown by Sornicola (1988) and D’Achille, Proietti, and Viviani (2005) to which I refer for a more detailed discussion. For the purposes of this paper, I will now turn attention to some properties that concern the relationship among the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of clefts. First, the biclausal structure of Cleft sentences allows the separation of presupposed and asserted content (Gómez-González 2007: 120–121): the first part, formed by the copula and the clefted constituent, introduces (i.e., asserts) the value that satisfies the variable x contained in the second part (the subordinate); the cleft clause conveys the presupposition that “there is an x to which the main predicate applies”. The biclausal syntax has also another important consequence because the isolation of the clefted constituent (whose referent is singled out as the value satisfying the variable) results in its pragmatic highlighting. Another motivation for using Cleft sentences is that they allow the interpretation without ambiguity of the semantic scope of logical operators (e.g., negation) within the sentence. According to Lambrecht (2001: 489–490) and Dufter (2009: 108), a monoclausal sentence, such as (16), is ambiguous between two readings (corresponding to sentences [17] and [18]); such ambiguity disappears by using a cleft as the narrow negation can have scope over only the clefted constituent, as in (17), or the cleft clause, as in (18): (16) John did not attend the party. (17) It was not John that attended the party. (18) It was John that did not attend the party.

The Cleft sentence in (17) presupposes that someone attended the party, but that referent is not to be identified with John in contrast with someone else (“it was not John that attended the party, but Jen”). On the contrary, the sentence in (18) presupposes that someone did not attend the party and John is identified as the one that did not come. In conclusion, the breaking of linear syntax into two parts is one the most distinctive features of Cleft sentences. This cleaving also determines important consequences at the level of information structure as some of its relevant properties (e.g., the distribution of given and new information and focus / background) can be mapped onto linear cleft structure in different ways. In the next section, I will explore the information structure properties of Cleft sentences and offer a classification of Italian and English occurrences. 3. Information structure and Cleft sentences According to both prosodic and semantic-pragmatic criteria, Cleft sentences have traditionally been considered focalizing devices, as shown in examples (5) and (6): the highlighted constituent receives a pitch accent,8 and it indicates the presence of relevant alternatives for semantic

8

In the remainder of the paper, given my focus on written data, I will not delve into prosodic factors.

4

interpretation9 (i.e., in sentences (5) and (6), Gianni and John are picked from a set of relevant contextual alternatives of the same semantic type, such as {Giorgio, Mary, Anna, Steve, …}). In cartographic approaches (É.Kiss 1998), the clefted constituent is claimed to be hosted in a special focus projection (FocP) in the syntax, where it receives an exclusive interpretation (i.e., the same semantic reading as exhaustive operators such as only. In example [6], for instance, given a set of alternatives, only John among them attended the party).10 However, not every cleft can be assigned a focalizing interpretation: in many occurrences of Cleft sentences no alternative exclusion (and no overall contrast) seem to be conveyed. Consider the following examples: (19) (Gianni ha bevuto troppo ieri sera). È per questo che oggi non si è presentato a lezione. (20) (John drank too much last night). It is for this reason that he didn’t show up to class today. (21) It was in 1886 that (…) Lewin published the first systematic study of the cactus. (Huber 2006: 551) 11

(22) È un anno che lavoro come traduttore. ‘It has been one year since I began working as a translator’ (23)

È con grande piacere che scrivo la prefazione di questo volume.

(24) It is with great pleasure that I am writing the preface to this volume.

In all these cases, the referent of the clefted constituent does not evoke relevant alternatives. In example (21), as a discourse starter, the prepositional phrase in 1886 does not contrast with other prepositional phrases, such as in 1885, in 1901 or in 2012, but instead creates a temporal setting. A similar observation applies to examples (23) and (24). Since Prince (1978), various proposals have countered the assumed monofunctionality of clefts. Prince first suggested a bipartition between canonical stressed-focus clefts (i.e., the focalizing clefts seen in examples [5] and [6]) and the so-called presupposition-informative clefts (a relative broad category under which we can subsume examples [19] to [24]). In comparison with monofunctional analyses, Prince’s proposal has the advantage of emphasizing the non-univocal mapping of information structure properties onto the linear syntax of clefts. As I will show below, information can in fact be distributed in different ways between the clefted constituent and the cleft clause. Moreover, recent research found a correlation between different types of clefts (e.g., stressed-focus clefts and informative-presupposition clefts) and different syntactic properties (see Dikken 2009).12 9

This intuitive definition of focus (see Krifka 2007: 18) is probably the most widespread in the current semantic literature. See also below in this section and note 16. 10 This is, however, a very controversial position (see Wedgwood et al. 2006). 11 This kind of occurrence is known as scissa temporale or spuria ‘temporal or spurious cleft’ in the Italian literature (Roggia 2009: 125–128). Grammatically, it is a quite peculiar construction as it allows the omission of the preposition da ‘since’: è un anno is thus equivalent to è da un anno ‘it has been one yearʼ. In Roggia (2009) these constructions are kept apart from canonical Cleft sentences, while others (e.g., Panunzi 2011) hold a more conservative view. In my classification, I chose to include temporal clefts (see section 4.3). 12 For instance, in the English informative-presupposition clefts, the complementizer that cannot be omitted and that cannot be used if the subject is [+ human] (for a detailed discussion, see Dikken 2009). Different types of clefts thus

5

Prince’s suggestions have been further developed in the last decades. Declerck (1988) considered the informative-presupposition type described by Prince too undifferentiated and put forward a further subclassification that depended on the information status of the clefted constituent. He thus proposed two new labels: 1) unstressed-anaphoric-focus clefts with a given clefted constituent and a new cleft clause, as in examples (19) and (20); and 2) discontinuous clefts, in which both the clefted constituent and the cleft clause are new, as in (21) to (24) (these examples are usually found at the beginning of the discourse). Although it is not based on givenness, but on the distribution of topic and comment within the sentence, Gundel’s and Hedberg’s classifications (see Gundel 2006, 2008; Hedberg and Fadden 2007) of three types overlap Declerck’s classification. According to Gundel and Hedberg, Cleft sentences can be divided into the following: topic-clause clefts (corresponding to stressed-focus clefts), comment-clause clefts (corresponding to Declerck’s unstressed-anaphoric-focus clefts) and, finally, all-comment clefts (corresponding to Declerck’s discontinuous clefts). Recently, Gómez-González (2007), following Collins (1991), proposed a classification of English clefts based on referential givenness, specifically recoverability; in this perspective, “given information is that which the speaker presents as recoverable from prior linguistic context or the situation, and new information is that which is presented as non recoverable” (Collins 1991: 91). Her classification displays three basic subtypes of clefts: new-given, given-new, and new-new.13 Whereas the aforementioned studies are based almost exclusively on the analysis of English data, Dufter (2009) offers a cross-linguistic enquiry on German and Romance Cleft sentences. In developing his taxonomy, he relies on the notions of focus and background and their distribution in the sentence. By so doing, he distinguishes three main classes: a focus-background (represented by examples [5] and [6] above), a background-focus (examples [19] and [20]), and finally an all-focus type (examples [23] and [24]). Finally, Roggia (2009) puts forward a fine-grained taxonomy of Italian clefts primarily based on information status (given, new, and inferable) and, as a secondary criterion, the cognitive activation of referents in the discourse. The interplay of these two parameters results in a very detailed description of the data (Roggia 2009: 139–156). In summary, it is interesting to note that these proposals, although often founded on different theoretical grounds, are substantially similar in their results. This fact strongly suggests that Cleft sentences are sensitive to distinct levels of information structure and that a truly comprehensive view of their information properties can be reached only if we consider these separate levels to interact.14 My aim in this paper is to propose an “integrated” classification, based on two independent criteria: referential givenness (Declerck 1988; Collins 1991; Gómez-González 2007) and the distribution of focus and background in the sentence (Dufter 2009). In the following pages, I will show that this choice is motivated by both empirical and theoretical factors. Regarding the basic terms of my analysis, I will use the following definitions. The given information label includes information that has been previously introduced in the discourse or that seem to show different syntactic as well as prosodic features. These findings contribute to weakening the position of scholars who defend a unitary analysis of clefts, such as Lambrecht (2001). 13 Within every type she also distinguishes between “inferable” and “contrastive” information (see Gómez-González 2007: 127). Quite interestingly, both Collins (1991: 110) and Gómez-González (2007: 124), by introducing the “contrastive” label (regarded as a category of newness), implicitly refer to another level of information structure (focus / background). 14 In other words, I want to avoid the “theoretical trap”, which is well explained in Dufter (2009: 101). According to Dufter, many analyses fail “to distinguish between two kinds of givenness, called referential and relational givenness [...] Put simply, a referring expression is referentially given if and only if the discourse referent that it denotes has been previously introduced into the discourse representation. Relational givenness, by contrast, must be evaluated relative to the sentence wherein an expression occurs”. Relational givenness refers thus to other levels of information structure, i.e., to the distribution of focus and background (Dufter 2009: 101) and topic and comment (Gundel 2006, 2008) within the Cleft sentence.

6

is otherwise pragmatically retrievable (the so-called inferable information, see Prince 1981).15 On the contrary, the new information label subsumes information that has not been previously mentioned and is not immediately retrievable (see Gómez-González 2007: 123). Focus and background, on the other hand, operate at the sentence level and signal an asymmetry between the part of the sentence (usually a constituent) “that relates an utterance to a set of relevant alternatives” (Zimmermann and Onea 2011: 1652)16 and the portion of the sentence that does not evoke alternatives (background). Considering these parameters at the same time, it is possible to derive a basic taxonomy: Table 1. A basic information-structural typology of Cleft sentences Clefted Constituent Type 1

Type 2

Cleft Clause

New

Given

Focus

Background

Given

New

Background

Focus

Type 3

All-New All-Focus

Type 1 represents the canonical Cleft sentence: this kind of cleft can be the answer to WH-questions such as: “who is working today?”. Consider the following examples in Italian and English: (25) È Gianni che lavora. (26) It is John who is working.

The content of the cleft clause is given, while the clefted constituent conveys new information and is associated with focus. Within a set of contextually relevant alternatives, John is the selected one (and is consequently pragmatically highlighted). However, as we will see below, focus and new information do not always coincide. Furthermore, this subtype of clefts apparently violates a basic information principle according to which old information usually precedes new information. Type 2 shows the reverse image of the information distribution just examined (thus providing a more “natural” distribution from old to new information). The clefted constituent refers to given information (represented by the anaphora “questo / this” in sentences [27] and [28]), whereas the cleft clause provides (totally or partially) new information. In addition, at the level of focus / background, we observe the mirror image of Type 1: the clefted constituent becomes the background, while the cleft clause (or part of it) is associated with focus. In a communicative

15

Given and inferable information are usually grouped together (see Ward and Birner 2004: 156 and the bibliographical references they provide). 16 In the sentence JOHN attended the party, the focalized subject points out that alternatives of the form x attended the party are relevant for semantic interpretation (i.e., in a more communicative perspective, the uttered sentence is evaluated by the hearer with respect to the potential knowledge that someone attended the party, see Zimmermann and Onea 2011: 1654). Please note that alternatives do not need to be introduced in the discourse (see also section 4.1) as focus does not necessarily express an explicit opposition between the selected value and the discarded alternatives. For a more detailed and technical discussion see Zimmermann and Onea (2011: 1652–1655).

7

situation, in which a famous athlete had to quit competing because of a severe injury, we could find the following cleft: (27) È per questo che i fan verseranno molte lacrime. (28) It is for this reason that fans will shed many tears.

Type 2 clefts can also allow the resumption of a spatio-temporal setting (a “frame topic”), previously introduced in the discourse (Dufter 2009: 102). Consider the following examples in which we imagine somebody talking about the goals he achieved in a certain city. At some point in the conversation, the speaker adds that he also met his future wife in the same place: (29) È sempre qui che ho incontrato la mia futura moglie. (30) It is also here that I met my future wife.

Finally, Type 3 is an all-new or all-focus17 cleft and is typically located at the beginning of a discourse / text: (31) È con piacere che vi presento i nostri ospiti. (32) It is with pleasure that I am going to introduce to you our guests. (33) È (da) tre anni che la Latveria ha un nuovo primo ministro.18 ‘It has been three years since Latveria got a new Prime Minister’

Before discussing in detail the discourse functions of the three types (section 4), it is important to observe from a methodological point of view some problematic occurrences found in the ICOCP data and how I chose to deal with them. Consider for instance the following two examples: (34) “Assolta”, “Una donna libera”, “Amanda liberata dalla corte”. Le testate statunitensi si inseguono, la Knox campeggia su tutte le prime pagine. Cnn e Fox News. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Miami Herald e Los Angeles Times: non c’è un sito che non dia risalto alla notizia. Senza contare i giornali locali di Seattle, la città dove è nata la Knox: la concittadina è al centro dell’informazione. Anche in Gran Bretagna al caso viene dato grande risalto, con occhio molto più critico, però, sulla fama di Amanda, che offusca e quasi sembra far dimenticare la vera vittima di questa storia, la cittadina britannica Meredith Kercher. La decisioni della Corte d’appello di Perugia risuona anche in Francia, Spagna e Germania. Su tutti i quotidiani è Amanda a conquistare la scena19: Sollecito è citato raramente, e sempre in secondo piano. (repubblica.it)20

17

These clefts are known as all-focus, because “the whole cleft clause is the domain of a single sentence-focus” (Dufter 2009: 99). 18 As already observed in note 11, such sentences are known in the Italian literature as scisse temporali or spurie. English does not have, however, a truly equivalent construction (D’Achille, Proietti, and Viviani 2005: 258). In the ICOCP corpus I found only one occurrence apparently similar to the Italian examples: it’s only been 40 year that we have the women’s vote (swissinfo.ch). 19 From now on, the Cleft sentences will be indicated in boldface within the examples. Please also note that the examples taken from newspapers are left unaltered: possible mistakes are included. 20 This example is drawn from the ICOCP corpus but not from the specific subcorpus analyzed in this paper (see the Introduction). I chose nonetheless to discuss this occurrence because it perfectly represents the kind of problematic examples that I am going to examine.

8

‘ “Acquitted”, “A free woman”, “Amanda set free by the court”. American newspapers run similar headlines. Amanda Knox stands out on the front pages of the CNN and Fox News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, and The Los Angeles Times: every website gives prominence to this news. In local newspapers in Seattle, the native city of Amanda Knox, the fellow citizen is the center of attention. In Great Britain, the news also has been given much prominence, but with a critical eye on Amanda’s reputation, who obfuscates and relegates to the background the true victim of this story, the British citizen Meredith Kercher. The decision of the court of appeal of Perugia echoes in France, Spain, and Germany. In all newspapers, it is Amanda that is in the limelight; Sollecito is seldom mentioned and [is] always in the background’ (35) These reports don’t stop to explain that more than 40% of people found ‘fit for work’ appeal against the decision, and of these, around 40% have the decision overturned. Instead they tend to assume that those found ‘fit for work’ have essentially been trying to cheat the system, whereas in fact it is often the system that has treated them badly. So if you are at one of the party conferences, take a minute to pick up the Daily Stigma newspaper and read the full story behind the headlines. It exposes the truth behind benefit fraud — 99.5% of sickness benefit claims are genuine. (guardian.co.uk)

In such cases, “è Amanda a conquistare la scena”, ‘it is Amanda that is in the limelight’, and “it is often the system that has treated them badly”, the clefted constituent represents the focus and pragmatically contrasts alternatives more or less explicitly presented in the text. For instance, Amanda contrasts with Sollecito (the other young indictee of the process) and the system in sentence (35) contrasts with the explicitly mentioned people‘fit for work’. Amanda and the system are both foci, but they are not at all discourse-new information. When the Cleft sentences in (34) and (35) are used, Amanda and the system are already discourse-given. In principle, if only the level of referential givenness were considered, it would be possible to make up another category for such examples, e.g., an “all-given” type (Johansson 2002 and Hasselgård 2004 actually introduced a special type / class for all-given clefts), but in the end this choice is problematic from a theoretical point of view. First, an all-given cleft would go against what has repeatedly been observed by many authors (e.g., Delin 1989; Delin and Oberlander 2005; Berretta 1996: 116; Dufter 2009: 101), i.e., that putting together old elements always results in a new connection between them.21 Second, creating a separate class for all-given occurrences would deny the intuitive but striking resemblance between clefts such as (34) and (35) and prototypical Type 1 examples, such as (25) and (26) (a similarity caused by the highlighted and focal nature of the clefted constituent). These considerations suggest that referential givenness alone is not sufficient to capture the informational and functional properties of Cleft sentences. Integrating referential givenness with insights from other levels of information structure (in particular focus / background) thus seems a necessary move. More specifically, the introduction of a cleft type that includes occurrences whose clefted constituent is both given and focalized is required. Another aspect is worth mentioning: in many examples (especially when the clefted constituent is a subject noun phrase, such as [34] and [35]) the clefted constituent not only identifies with the focus, but also presents topic features.22 Like Dufter (2009), I am keen to analyze such examples as contrastive topics, “which arguably exhibit topic and focus properties” (Dufter 2009: 101; see also Krifka 1999; Hedberg in press). A

21

As Delin and Oberlander claim: “even a conjunction of ‘old’ elements presents a novel, second-order connection between the two” (Delin and Oberlander 2005 based on Delin 1989: 213). 22 The role of the clefted constituent as topic can be suggested by its information status. However, topichood cannot always be equated with givenness (a topic constituent can also be made up of new material, see Molnár 1998).

9

sentence containing a contrastive topic should also present a secondary focus;23 consequently, the cleft clause should also be partially or totally associated with focus as seems the case in (34) and (35).24 Analogue cases (i.e., where we can observe more than one focus in the Cleft sentence) are provided in our corpus by the occurrence of the so-called multiple foci clefts (see Huber 2006: 569– 570; Dufter 2009: 100; Roggia 2009: 113–115).25 I found only four examples in the Italian section and one in the English section: (36) Anche questo settembre, circa quattromila ragazzi italiani hanno iniziato l’anno accademico in un’università americana. In Italia la chiamano “fuga dei cervelli”, ma in inglese si dice “brain drain”, che letteralmente significa “perdita di cervelli” [...] sono loro a scappare, non è l’Italia che perde capitale umano qualificato a causa di sistemi accademici e industriali poco competitivi sul piano internazionale [...] (ilsole24ore.com) ‘Once again this September, about four thousand Italian young persons started the academic year in an American university. In Italy, this is called “brain escape”, but in English one says “brain drain”, which literally means “leaking of brains” [...] it is they who leave, it is not Italy that loses qualified human resources because of a lack of competitive academic and industrial systems [...]’ (37) So what were the signs, and when did they occur? Was it she who revealed them, gradually; or was it I, as my senses and my body and my mind gradually came back to life, who noticed them, one by one, reassembling the parts into a whole? We were in a cafe one morning, and she visibly tensed up. (guardian.co.uk)

I will consider examples (34) to (37) as a subtype of Type 1 cleft (Type 1b), where the clefted constituent is both a given element and a focus. The information status of the cleft clause does not appear to be relevant but the subordinate must be associated wholly or partly with focus as well. Specifically, in my classification Type 1b includes occurrences with a given and focalized clefted constituent, instances of contrastive topics, and multiple foci constructions. In the light of these observations, a more refined version of Table 1 can now be proposed (see also Korzen in this volume for a similar classification). The final result perfectly overlaps Dufter’s taxonomy (Dufter 2009: 100). The only difference is the inclusion of the dimension of referential givenness in my proposal:

23

“Contrastive topics always occur in expressions that have another focus outside of the contrastive topic” (Krifka 2007: 47). Consider the following example: [My sister]Focus 1 / Topic studies [History]Focus 2. [My brother] Focus 1 / Topic studies [Civil engineering]Focus 2. 24 In example (34) Amanda is said “to be in the limelight”, while Raffaele Sollecito is “seldom mentioned” in newspapers. In (35) the contrast holds between people fit for work that are assumed “to cheat the systemˮ and the system that “treats them badly”. 25 Although in my corpus all the multiple foci occurrences are represented by given or inferable clefted constituents (this is probably due to the fact that in multiple foci construction one focus may also be a topic, see Huber 2006: 570), in principle “this givenness might not be a necessary requirement” (Huber 2006: 570). Following this observation, it might be more accurate to introduce a further subtype of Type 1 for only multiple foci clefts. However, for the purposes of this paper and the empirical results in the corpus, I think this move is unnecessary here.

10

Table 2. A more refined information-structural typology of Cleft sentences Clefted Constituent

Cleft Clause

Type 1a

New

Given

Type 1b

Focus Given

Background Not relevant

Type 2

Focus1 Given

Focus2 New

Background Type 3

Focus All-New All-Focus

In summary, referential givenness and focus / background seem to combine well. On the one hand, as already shown, referential givenness could not be used alone to describe in detail the different informational classes (i.e., it would fail to recognize the functional similarity between prototypical Type 1a clefts and the occurrences hosting a clefted constituent both given and associated with focus). On the other hand, considering information status in addition to focus / background permits a more accurate assessment of the functional differences concerning the role of the clefted constituent in Types 1a and 1b (e.g., in the latter the coexistence of both givenness and focal features often hints at the presence of a contrastive topic). Moreover, referential givenness in addition to focus / background also suggests the expected contexts of use of certain cleft types (e.g., a Type 3 occurrence entirely made up of new information is typically encountered as a discourse starter). Based on this classification, I will provide the result of a quantitative analysis conducted on 200 occurrences (I classified 97 of 100 clefts in both Italian and English for a total of 194 examples):26 Table 3. The distribution of the different types of Italian clefts in the corpus Number of occurrences Type 1a 26

% 27%

Type 1b

49

51%

Type 2

15

15%

Type 3

7

7%

Total

97

100%

26

The study of clefts in discourse is not an exact science. A number of examples required very careful analysis and in almost every case a second (or third) rethinking. I could not come to a decision concerning three examples in Italian and another three occurrences in English.

11

Table 4. The distribution of the different types of English clefts in the corpus Number of occurrences Type 1a 51

% 53%

Type 1b

29

30%

Type 2

11

11%

Type 3

6

6%

Total

97

100%

The data revealed several interesting asymmetries and similarities between the two languages. Starting with the differences, Type 1a clefts or prototypical clefts (focalizing devices with a new clefted constituent) are the most represented occurrences in English, whereas the use of Type 1b is less frequent although still relevant. In this respect, Italian data shows the reverse of the English situation: prototypical clefts are not as widespread as the “special” Type 1b, whose occurrences are almost twice as frequent as the Type 1a examples. In section 5, I will suggest some possible explanations concerning this quantitative difference. The distribution of Type 2 and Type 3 clefts, on the contrary, is quite similar in the two languages, although Type 2 clefts are slightly more common in Italian. The distributions shown in Tables 3 and 4 are not very different from the picture offered by other quantitative studies (see Roggia 2009: 142 for Italian; Collins 1991: 111; Gómez-González 2007: 124 for English). A direct, one-to-one comparison among these works is not an easy task because these classifications, although similar, do not overlap. However, by abstracting from the most idiosyncratic features of every analysis, it is possible to state that the larger diffusion of Types 1b and 2 in Italian is supported by the findings in Roggia (2009: 142).27 Gómez-González (2007), on the other hand, points out the large predominance of Type 1 clefts in English (i.e., Type 1a in my taxonomy), whereas in her study the distribution of Type 2 and 3 is quite different from the one observed in my corpus.28 4. Discourse functions of Italian and English Cleft sentences As already mentioned, the monofunctional view of clefts as focalizing devices was abandoned in the light of Prince’s works. In the previous section, I examined the information profiles of clefts; I will show how the differences in the information structure of clefts play a role in determining their discourse-pragmatic functions. 4.1. Type 1a and Type 1b

27

His three categories focus dato attivo ‘active given focus’, focus dato semiattivo / inattivo ‘semiactive / inactive given focus’, and inferibile ‘inferable’ are equivalent to Types 1b and 2 in my classification. According to Roggia (2009:142), whose analysis is based on a corpus containing 530 occurrences, these clefts are the most widespread in Italian, representing cumulatively 66.7% of his data. 28 This fact largely depends on the different parameters used in Gómez-González (2007), which includes, for instance, multiple foci clefts within Type 3. However, in Gómez-González (2007) Type 1 clefts represent 51.65% of the data (the total number of her corpus occurrences amounts to 422 examples). In Collins (1991: 111), whose corpus contains 752 occurrences, Type 1 clefts are only slightly predominant (36.0%). In Gómez-González (2007), Type 2 represents 18.72% and Type 3 is equal to 29.62% of the data. In Collins (1991), Type 2 accounts for 34.6% and Type 3 for 29.4% of the data.

12

According to my data, the main discourse functions carried out by Type 1a and 1b clefts are the highlighting of the clefted constituent and the expression of pragmatic contrast (Huber 2006: 559; Dufter 2009: 99). These functions are strictly dependent on the semantic properties of clefts as specificational copular structures and the role of the clefted constituent as a focus (see section 2). Hence, as I showed above (section 3), a value for the variable contained in the cleft clause is provided, and this value is picked from a set of relevant alternatives. The highlighting of the clefted constituent is the result of focalization and refers to its pragmatic importance; the clefted constituent is, so to speak, put at the forefront of the message. However, highlighting does not require an explicit opposition within the text between the clefted constituent and other discourse referents (in other words, focus does not necessarily express an explicit opposition between the selected value and relevant alternatives). In example (38), for instance, there is no obvious contrast involving la forte pioggia ‘heavy rain’; the same observation applies to the struggle of indigenous Inuits and shrinking ice in example (39): (38) Un muro di contenimento è crollato travolgendo due bambini, rispettivamente di 4 e 6 anni, che fortunatamente sono rimasti illesi. Le due piccole vittime sono state portate in ospedale, al momento non si conoscono le loro condizioni. È accaduto in serata a Somma Vesuviana, nel napoletano. Potrebbe essere stata la forte pioggia che si è abbattuta oggi pomeriggio sul napoletano ad avere provocato il cedimento di un terrapieno. (leggo.it) ‘A retaining wall collapsed, crushing two children, four and six years old, who were fortunately unharmed. The two little victims were brought to the hospital, but at the moment their conditions are unknown. It happened last evening at Somma Vesuviana, in the outskirts of Naples. It could have been the heavy rain, which fell this afternoon in the Naples area, which caused the embankment to collapseʼ (39) Last year, Verheggen, a cultural ambassador for UNESCO, erected a huge sculpture on an iceberg off the coast of Greenland, an area he has visited annually for many years. It was the struggle of the indigenous Inuits to cope with extreme temperatures and shrinking ice that prompted thoughts of building an ice-making piece of art in the desert. “Let’s accept the climate is changing,” he says. “We have to see that as a challenge, to find new ways to deal with the changes in climate circumstances.” (nytimes.com/pages/aponline)

The label pragmatic contrast29 (see Huber 2006: 563) is used in this paper only for contexts in which the focalized referent is explicitly opposed to alternatives, such as in example (40) (a reduced form of [34]) and example (41): (40) “Assolta”, “Una donna libera”, “Amanda liberata dalla corte”. Le testate statunitensi si inseguono, la Knox campeggia su tutte le prime pagine […] Su tutti i quotidiani, è Amanda a conquistare la scena: Sollecito è citato raramente, e sempre in secondo piano. (repubblica.it) ‘ “Acquitted”, “A free woman”, “Amanda set free by the court”. American newspapers run similar headlines [...] In all newspapers, it is Amanda that is in the limelight; Sollecito is seldom mentioned and [is] always in the background’ (41) I have felt for some time that there has been an element in all this of “don’t frighten the horses” and, personally, I think it underestimates — nay, insults — the intelligence of women. Screening is not like vaccination. We are not going to infect anybody else if we don’t go for breast screening. If a cancer is missed, it is an individual who suffers, not the population as a whole. (guardian.co.uk)

29

Pragmatic contrast obviously involves highlighting of the clefted constituent as well. However, what I want to point out here is the functional difference between cleft occurrences, which present an explicit opposition among alternatives in the discourse (pragmatic contrast), and other cleft occurrences, which do not (mere highlighting only).

13

In these cases, Amanda is contrasted with Sollecito and, in the English example, an individual is opposed to the population as a whole. The following tables show the distribution of these functions in the data: Table 5. The discourse-functions of Type 1a and b clefts in Italian Mere highlighting only Pragmatic contrast

Total

Type 1a

17 (65%)

9 (35%)

26 (100%)

Type 1b

23 (47%)

26 (53%)

49 (100%)

Table 6. The discourse-functions of Type 1a and b clefts in English Mere highlighting only Pragmatic contrast

Total

Type 1a

24 (47%)

27 (53%)

51 (100%)

Type 1b

11 (38%)

18 (62%)

29 (100%)

Whereas in Italian Type 1a is specialized for the mere highlighting of the clefted constituent and Type 1b preferably expresses pragmatic contrast30, in English the contrastive function is more widespread in both types (but especially in Type 1b). At the level of topic / comment organization in the discourse (Ferrari et al. 2008: 58), Type 1a clefts introduce new referents (in the clefted constituent), which can be used as sentence topics31 in the subsequent text; e.g., Lewis Hamilton, who is then referred to as il pilota britannico ‘the British driver’, in (42) and Tom Watson in (43): (42) È stato l’incostante ma sempre determinato Lewis Hamilton, al volante di una McLaren tornata in gran forma, a creare la sorpresa del giorno [...] Il pilota britannico[Topic] si è mantenuto concentrato anche oggi e nell’ultimo giro ha piazzato un tempone [...] (leggo.it) ‘It was a fickle but always determined Lewis Hamilton who, behind the wheel of his McLaren now back in shape, produced the surprise of the day [...] The British driver[Topic] maintained his concentration today and set the fastest time on the final lap [...]’ (43) In many ways, and over two hours and 37 minutes, Murdoch acquitted himself coolly, even at moments when he could easily have slipped up. It was Tom Watson MP who produced the surprise of the day with new evidence from Neville Thurlbeck, the former NoW chief reporter. Watson[Topic] said that Thurlbeck told him he had been told by the former company lawyer Tom Crone that James Murdoch had in fact seen the critical “for Neville” email in 2008 — the evidence that showed phone hacking went beyond the actions of a single reporter. In a gripping moment, Watson[Topic] read out Thurlbeck’s words on the matter and invited the mogul elect to respond. (guardian.co.uk)

This function is known in the literature as topic launching (Hasselgård 2004). Topic launching and contrast can also overlap (as they belong to different levels). It may well be the case in example (43), where Tom Watson is selected in contrast to Murdoch, who “acquitted himself coolly” but did not “produce any surprise of the day”. Consider now the following example: 30

In Italian Type 1b clefts, there is however no dramatic difference between the frequencies of the two functions. I define a sentence topic in terms of aboutness, following Reinhart (1981) and Lambrecht (1994). “A referent is interpreted as the topic of a proposition if in a given situation the proposition is construed as being about this referent” (Lambrecht 1994: 131). 31

14

(44) Twins Mary-Kate[Topic 1] and Ashley Olsen[Topic 2] are still getting confused for each another, and now it’s having an effect on their dating lives. Reports circulated Wednesday that Ashley[Topic 2] got cozy with “Saturday Night Live” funnyman Jason Sudeikis at the recent premiere after-party for the flick “Tower Heist,” but a source confirmed to amNewYork that it was actually Mary Kate who chatted up with the comedian. Mary-Kate[Topic 1], 25, and Sudeikis, 36, were “super-flirty” at the bash, held at Stone Rose Lounge at the Time Warner Center, an eyewitness told us. (amny.com)

This case is similar to (42) and (43), but it is not exactly the same. The main difference is obviously that the Cleft sentence belongs to Type 1b, i.e., the clefted constituent is given. Therefore, the Cleft sentence in (44) launches as a topic a referent previously introduced in the discourse (Mary-Kate Olsen) and that has already served as a sentence topic, but was temporarily set aside in favor of another topic (Ashley Olsen). I will thus refer to this function as topic relaunching. Tables 7 and 8 show that both functions are not at all common in the two languages: Table 7. Total number of Cleft sentences carrying out topic launching and relaunching functions in Italian Topic Launching Topic Relaunching Type 1a

2

0

Type 1b

0

3

Table 8. Total number of Cleft sentences carrying out topic launching and relaunching functions in English Topic Launching Topic Relaunching Type 1a

4

0

Type 1b

0

2

4.2. Type 2 clefts The mapping of information structure onto the biclausal structure of Type 2 (i.e., given / new) suggests that their “natural” usage is to connect different parts of the discourse:32 (45) Schmidt è [...] un ingegnere col pallino degli affari, che da Sun Microsystems è passato a Novell, dove ha potuto assaggiare la sconfitta al termine di un lungo braccio di ferro col gigante e concorrente Microsoft. E forse è anche per questo che non solo è stato chiamato a guidare Google, ma a far parte del consiglio di amministrazione di Apple nell’agosto del 2006. (repubblica.it) ‘Schmidt is [...] an engineer who has a bent for business, moving from Sun Microsystems to Novell, where he could sense defeat at the end of a long arm wrestling with the rival giant Microsoft. It is perhaps also for this reason that he has been appointed not only to lead Google but also to be part of the Apple board of governors in August 2006’ (46) Angela Merkel said to David Cameron: either you allow us to go ahead with treaty change at 27 or others [Nicolas Sarkozy] will want a separate treaty with separate institutions for the 17. She said she did not want that but others did. Relations between Cameron and Merkel have improved since then after the prime minister indicated that Britain accepts the need for treaty change and will table

32

As Hedberg in press rightly observes, although the information contained in the cleft clause is new, the conveyed presupposition is marked as a “known fact” (as noted by Prince 1978) and “it reminds more than inform” (Delin 1992). Therefore the new piece of information can be easily accommodated by the hearer.

15

relatively modest demands. The repatriation of social and employment laws will be for a later treaty negotiation. It is amid this background that José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, entered the fray on Wednesday with a major speech in Berlin. One line caused some irritation in London when Barroso had a pop at Britain: The speed of the European Union, and a fortiori of the euro area, cannot be the speed of its slowest member or its most reluctant member. […] The Anglophile former Portuguese prime minister, whose favourite English publication is the Spectator, said “a split union will not work”. Barroso believes that Britain should hug him and Merkel close because a view is developing in Brussels that France is attempting to unravel two key British achievements over the last 20 years. (guardian.co.uk)

In both examples, the clefted constituent ensures (because of its givenness) an anaphoric connection with the previous discourse, while the cleft clause introduces (because of its newness) new content and establishes a link with the following sentences. The generic cohesive function of Type 2 clefts, which is recognized in the literature (Berretta 1995, 2002; Roggia 2009; Dufter 2009: 103) acquires specific subfunctions depending on their position within the discourse. Consider again examples (45) and (46): in the former, the cleft links different text portions within the same paragraph, whereas in the latter the Cleft sentence provides a thematic connection between two distinct paragraphs. Understandably, at the end of a text / paragraph, the cohesive nature of clefts results in a “summative” use (Hasselgård 2004), i.e., a kind of conclusion and / or resume: (47) Nel laboratorio intitolato a Enrico Fermi, che contribuì allo sviluppo dell’energia atomica all’università di Chicago, il futuro sembra in ogni caso denso di impegni. Nei prossimi mesi, infatti, i ricercatori cercheranno di verificare i risultati dell’esperimento Cngs 4 (Cern Neutrino to Gran Sasso), secondo il quale i neutrini sarebbero stati più veloci della luce di circa 60 nanosecondi. Il Fermilab è uno dei due laboratori al mondo ad avere le carte in regola per farlo. L’altro, in Giappone, ha subito rallentamenti a causa del terremoto e dello tsunami dello scorso marzo, per cui è da qui che si attendono i primi risultati. (repubblica.it) ‘In the lab named after Enrico Fermi, who contributed to the development of atomic energy at the University of Chicago, the future looks busy. In the following months, researchers will try to confirm the results of experiment Cngs 4 (Cern Neutrino to Gran Sasso), which found that neutrins are about 60 nanoseconds faster than light. Fermilab is one of two labs in the world that are fully equipped to do it. The other lab, in Japan, was hindered by the earthquake and tsunami of last March; therefore it is from here [i.e., Fermilab] that the first results are awaited’ (48) “It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that I have decided to end my six-year marriage to Ashton. As a woman, a mother and a wife, there are certain values and vows that I hold sacred, and it is in this spirit that I have chosen to move forward with my life.” (amny.com)

The following quantitative inquiry reveals that most Type 2 occurrences in the corpus are located within a paragraph:

16

Table 9. Text position of Type 2 clefts in the Italian data (number of occurrences) Within a paragraph Between two End of a paragraph / paragraphs text Type 2 9 3 3 Table 10. Text position of Type 2 clefts in the English data (number of occurrences) Within a paragraph Between two End of a paragraph / paragraphs text Type 2 8 1 2

Total 15

Total 11

Furthermore, Type 2 can introduce in the cleft clause a referring expression that may be subsequently resumed as a sentence topic. This discourse strategy (named topic shifting in Hasselgård 2004) is used to lead to a topic change.33 The following is the only (clear) example found in the corpus (a reduced form of [46]): (49) It is amid this background that José Manuel Barroso […] entered the fray on Wednesday with a major speech in Berlin. One line caused some irritation in London when Barroso [Topic] had a pop at Britain: The speed of the European Union, and a fortiori of the euro area, cannot be the speed of its slowest member or its most reluctant member […] The Anglophile former Portuguese prime minister[Topic], whose favourite English publication is the Spectator, said “a split union will not work”. Barroso[Topic] believes that Britain should hug him and Merkel close because a view is developing in Brussels that France is attempting to unravel two key British achievements over the last 20 years. (guardian.co.uk)

Interestingly, in principle, a similar function can also be fulfilled by Type 1b clefts. In (50), the cleft allows the journalist a successful transition from a previous topic to a new one, i.e., from il Capo dello Stato Giorgio Napolitano, sua moglie Clio e il Presidente del Consiglio Silvio Berlusconi ‘the President Giorgio Napolitano, his wife Clio, and the Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’ to il Pontefice ‘the Pope’: (50) Napolitano e signora con Berlusconi per saluto italiano al Papa. Saranno il Capo dello Stato Giorgio Napolitano, sua moglie Clio e il Presidente del Consiglio Silvio Berlusconi ha [sic] rendere omaggio, con un breve saluto, a Benedetto XVI al termine della cerimonia, a nome della delegazione italiana. Dopo il rito di beatificazione e la recita del Regina Coeli il Pontefice[Topic] riceverà infatti i principali rappresentanti delle delegazioni ufficiali [...] (repubblica.it) ‘Napolitano and his wife, with Berlusconi, will pay homage to the Pope on behalf of Italy. It will be the President Giorgio Napolitano, his wife Clio, and the Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi who will briefly pay homage to Benedict XVI at the end of the ceremony in the name of the Italian delegation. After the beatification and the saying of the Regina Coeli, the Pope[Topic] will receive the spokesmen of the official delegations [...]’

This functional contiguity should come as no surprise as Type 1b and Type 2 clefts are very similar in their information status (see Table 2). On the other hand, they also differ considerably in the repartition of focus / background within the sentence (the clefted constituent in Type 2 clefts is entirely backgrounded) and this fact determines the overall different distribution between the two groups. 4.3. Type 3 clefts

33

See Agar Marco (in this volume) for some considerations of Pseudo-cleft sentences and topic shifting.

17

Ideally, all-new (or all-focus) clefts introduce a discourse and are thus located at the beginning of a speech. They can be formulaic discourse starters, with clefted prepositional phrases, such as con piacere ‘with pleasure’, with honor, etc., in both Italian and English: (51) In tribuna, la famiglia Monti al completo, la moglie Elsa, i figli Giovanni e Federica. In scuro e senza le consuete cravatte azzurro-celesti, Monti parte così: “È con grande emozione che mi rivolgo a voi”. (lastampa.it) ‘In the parliament gallery is the whole Monti family: his wife, Elsa, and their son and daughter, Giovanni and Federica. [Dressed] in a dark suit without his customary pale-blue tie, Monti begins: “It is with profound emotion that I address you” ’ (52) “It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that I have decided to end my six-year marriage to Ashton. As a woman, a mother and a wife, there are certain values and vows that I hold sacred, and it is in this spirit that I have chosen to move forward with my life.” (amny.com)

Example (52) ([48]) is particularly noteworthy. In addition to the cleft at the end of the quoted speech (the Type 2 one that I have already discussed in section 4.2), this example contains a Type 3 occurrence right at the beginning. According to Hasselgård (2004), such clefts are used to give particular prominence to what the speaker experiences in a particular communicative situation. However, such description does not consider that these constructions, as well as Type 2 clefts such as (45) and (46), are probably undergoing a grammaticalization process that is turning them into textual connectors (Berretta 2002)34 or rhetorical devices used as discourse starters. Their evolving grammaticalized status is in fact accompanied by the loss of an alternative evoking function (Roggia 2009: 137) and, formally, by the presence of formulaic prepositional phrases and / or adverbials in the clefted constituent. Type 3 includes other kinds of occurrences, such as Cleft sentences that provide a spatiotemporal setting. As Huber (2006: 566) points out, these clefts tend to appear in a discourse-initial position, such as formulaic ones. The clefted constituent usually hosts a temporal (or spatial) adverbial that serves as a “frame topic”, i.e., “it anchors the proposition within a temporal or local situation” (Huber 2006: 566). The Italian data also showed temporal clefts (section 3) that seem marginal, even pragmatically and grammatically odd, in English (example [54] is the only occurrence found in the corpus): (53) Oggi lo scienziato ha ritirato il premio Ig Nobel per la Biologia con il giusto umorismo: “Era molto che me l’aspettavo, perché ci avete messo così tanto?” (repubblica.it) ‘Today the scientist collected the Ig Nobel prize for Biology with an appropriate sense of humor: “I have been waiting for this for a long time [Lit. it has been a while since I have been waiting for this]. Why did it take you so long?” ’ (54) “We will have to analyse it and see if we can do something. There are many things that have to do with society, where can we influence it,” said Verrey. “It’s only been 40 years that we have the women’s vote, it’s unbelievable but it is the way it is. In Switzerland it takes a very long time to do anything. It takes one step after another. And a big leap at the end.” (swissinfo.ch)

Finally, I chose to include within this information type the following examples, (55) and (56), that are by no means prototypical Type 3 clefts, but are entirely composed of new information. Because

34

Type 3 clefts seem more constrained than Type 2 ones because of their information status (all-new), which in most cases favors their presence at the beginning of a text.

18

of their appearance (they report a quotation in the cleft clause and the author of the quoted material in the clefted constituent), they can be referred to as “quotation clefts”: (55) Il pendolo oscilla tra individuo libero e individuo egoista: i nuovi mercati di Steve non sono né liberi né paritari. Sono giardini recintati, dove un solo doganiere decide cosa si vende, cosa non si vende, inventando una censura “locale” perfino sulle parolacce, e un diritto separato, che è la pretesa di tutti i Facebook e colossi di questo mondo. Era stato Orwell a scrivere “la libertà è schiavitù” e il pendolo di Steve, che era partito proprio con l’immagine di un colpo di martello sull’icona del totalitarismo orwelliano di Ibm (nel famoso commercial di Ridley Scott del 1984) è andato regolarmente al polo opposto alla libertà, economica in questo caso. (repubblica.it) ‘The pendulum sways between a free individual and an egotistic one; the new markets [created] by Steve are neither free nor equal. They are like fenced gardens where a sole custom officer decides what can be sold and what cannot be sold, thus creating “local” censorship even on swear words and distinct laws, which is the implicit ambition of Facebook and other [financial] giants. It was Orwell that wrote “freedom is slavery”; Steve’s pendulum, which in the beginning was identified with a hammer blow on IBM, the symbol of Orwellian totalitaniarism (as conveyed in the famous 1984 ad by Ridley Scott), has moved constantly towards the opposite of liberty, which in this case is economic liberty’ (56) “From then on, the body was the site of a battle between germs and disease, and I think that’s something that’s still very vivid in our cultural memory — even though the idea has become more nuanced and these days we’re aware of things like ‘good bacteria’, and even though some scientists believe that we are cleaning our environs too harshly and that this is leading to a rise in things like asthma, you still have all these ads on TV that talk of ‘waging war on dirt and germs’.” “But it’s a complex issue,” she adds. “It was the anthropologist Mary Douglas who said: ‘There is no such thing as absolute dirt. It exists in the eye of the beholder.’ ” (guardian.co.uk)

For the sake of simplicity, Type 3 tokens can be split between two classes: formulaic and nonformulaic (i.e., frame topics and quotation clefts) occurrences. Tables 11 and 12 below show the result of a quantitative inquiry: Table 11. Formulaic and non-formulaic Type 3 cleft sentences in Italian (number of occurrences) Formulaic Non-formulaic Type 3 1 6

Total 7

Table 12. Formulaic and non-formulaic Type 3 cleft sentences in English (number of occurrences) Formulaic Non-formulaic Type 3 3 3

Total 6

The few available examples notwithstanding, we can observe that (at least in the corpus) non formulaic occurrences seem preferable to formulaic ones in Italian, while English shows a perfect symmetry between the two groups. Type 3 clefts are usually claimed to be typical of English (Dufter 2009: 106; Hasselgård 2004), but my data might suggest that in fact only formulaic Type 3 clefts seem more widespread in English than in Italian. 5. Specific functions within journalistic texts I have examined so far the most typical discourse-pragmatic properties of Cleft sentences in both Italian and English as well as the connection between these functions and the different information structure properties exhibited by clefts. Because our corpus is made of journalistic texts, it would be interesting to determine whether more specific functions can be fulfilled within this text typology. The corpus analysis suggests the existence of journalist-related uses of Cleft sentences, and it also 19

hints that they are not new functions at all, but instead local, text-dependent instantiations of the more general functions already examined (e.g., discourse-cohesive uses). As the present inquiry makes no pretence of being exhaustive, the remainder of this section will be largely descriptive.35 The most striking function is perhaps the “connection” or “link” that a Cleft sentence can build between different textual units, i.e., headlines, subheads, and the body of the article. Consider the following examples: (57) STEVE JOBS NON CE L’HA FATTA ADDIO AL FONDATORE DELLA APPLE UNO SCARNO COMUNICATO DELL’AZIENDA RIVELA AL MONDO LA SCOMPARSA DI UNO DEI SIMBOLI DELL’ÈRA DIGITALE. POCHE SETTIMANE FA AVEVA DOVUTO RINUNCIARE AD OGNI INCARICO NEL GRUPPO CHE AVEVA CREATO [...] SAN FRANCISCO – È uno scarno comunicato della sua azienda, la Apple di Cupertino, che dà la notizia attraverso l’Associated Press […] (repubblica.it) ‘STEVE JOBS DID NOT MAKE IT. FAREWELL TO THE FOUNDER OF APPLE. A BRIEF PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT BY HIS COMPANY DISCLOSES THE DEATH OF ONE OF THE SYMBOLS OF THE DIGITAL ERA. A FEW WEEKS AGO HE HAD TO RENOUNCE HIS APPOINTMENT IN THE COMPANY HE CREATED [...] San Francisco - It was a brief public announcement by his company, Apple [headquarters] in Cupertino, that disseminated the news through the Associated Press’ (58) RED CROSS OPENS NEW LOGISTICS CENTRE A CENTRE TO HOUSE STOCKS FOR THE HUMANITARIAN MISSIONS OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS (ICRC) WAS OPENED IN SATIGNY NEAR GENEVA ON WEDNESDAY. “It’s here that a large part of the medicines, orthopedic equipment, water treatment equipment and the other material to be sent to help victims of conflicts will be received, stored and then dispatched” (swissinfo.ch)

In examples (57) and (58), the content of the clefted constituent and the cleft clause is at first glance given (it has already been introduced in the headline or, in the Italian example, the summary. Both the headline and the summary are written in small caps in the examples). Furthermore, in this case we refer to different textual units, i.e., units that have a different status in the discourse and are in principle independent from each other. However, this is true only in principle, as the anaphoric use of the adverbial in (58) points out that the reader cannot possibly reconstruct the reference for here without knowing the headline and the summary content. Moreover, a closer look reveals that these two Cleft sentences are not entirely given: new information is in fact presented. In (57), the content of the cleft is more detailed than the information presented in the summary; in (58), a Type 2 cleft, the content of the cleft clause is almost completely new. These clefts fulfill a metatextual function to the extent that (a) they ensure thematic continuity between different levels of the text that in principle can be read separately and (b) they seem to elaborate on the main discourse topic(s) already presented in higher textual units. This function is very rare in the English corpus (the only example is [58] from the Swiss agency ATS), but it is quite common in Italian, as examples (59) and (60) show: (59) STIPENDI DEI PARLAMENTARI, DECIDERANNO LE CAMERE. FINI: “MODIFICHE A GENNAIO” 35

For other analyses of the functions exhibited by clefts in journalistic texts, I refer to Banks (1999) and GómezGonzález (2007) for English, and to Bonomi (2002) for Italian.

20

[...] ROMA - Saranno le Camere a provvedere al taglio delle indennità di deputati e senatori e non un decreto del governo come prevedeva la manovra. (leggo.it) ‘PARLIAMENTARY SALARIES, THE CHAMBERS WILL DECIDE. FINI: “CHANGES IN JANUARY” [...] Rome- It will be the Chambers that will cut the salaries of representatives and senators and not a decree, as previously planned in the financial measures’ (60) RUSSIA, PARTITO OLIGARCA ARRUOLA POPSTAR PRIMO “COLPO” PER CAUSA GIUSTA DEL MAGNATE IN VISTA ELEZIONI [...] MOSCA, 6 SET - È l’oligarca Mikhail Prokhorov a fare il primo colpaccio della campagna elettorale per le legislative del 4 dicembre. (ansa.it) ‘RUSSIA, OLIGARCH PARTY ENLISTS A POP STAR. FIRST “HIT” OF THE TYCOON FOR RIGHT CAUSE IN VIEW OF THE ELECTIONS. [...] Moscow, September 6 - It is the oligarch Mikahil Prokhrov who first hit the jackpot during the campaign for the legislative elections on December 4ʼ

The clefts in (59) and (60) are probably best analyzed as Type 1b occurrences: the clefted constituents, le Camere, ‘the Parliament’, and the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, respectively, are given referents (already introduced in the title or the summary) but also appear to be associated with focus. The different distributions of Italian and English in this respect require further observation; strictly speaking, this divergence does not seem to be caused by language-internal factors, but by the different construction and organization of journalistic articles in the two languages. Italian newspapers in fact present a higher degree of discourse cohesion between different subparts of the text, whereas in English these units seem in principle more independent from one another. In this light, the strategy of Italian journalists is more oriented towards a repetition / elaboration of the main discourse topic(s), even at the cost of a certain redundancy. Another function observed in the corpus is the ability of clefts to link quoted speech and the journalist’s own writing, as the following examples show: (61) “Non ho paura di niente” e “non mi pento di niente”. È con queste parole che Cesare Battisti apre un’intervista a uno dei più diffusi settimanali brasiliani, Istoè (repubblica.it) ‘ “I am not afraid of anything” and “I do not regreat anything.” It is with these words that Cesare Battisti started an interview with one of the most widespread Brazilian weekly publications, the Istoè’ (62) Marie, 23, doesn’t offer any comfortable excuses for how she ended up in such a dark place. Growing up in a three-bedroom house in Leicester with two older brothers, she was a loved child. “My dad left when I was one, but my mum did the best she could. She always put us first.” It was at school, rather than at home, that Marie had problems. The bullying started in primary school, but got worse when she started secondary school. “It went on every day, in and out of school, physical and verbal.” (guardian.co.uk)

In such occurrences, the Type 2 occurrence in (61) refers back to the words used by Cesare Battisti in the quoted speech (“non ho paura di niente” e “non mi pento di niente”, ‘ “I am not afraid of anything” and “I do not regreat anything” ’) and introduces new content in the cleft clause (che Cesare Battisti apre un’intervista...‘that Cesare Battisti started an interview...’). In example (62), 21

there are two different discourse levels: the story told by the interviewee reported in the quoted speech and the commentaries made by the journalist in between the different pieces of the interview. The cleft helps to construct the transition from one sequence of the story to another and allows the journalist to make some introductory statements about what is going to come next. Similar examples are (63) and (64): in (63) we observe a mix of the journalist’s own writing and the quoted speech within the cleft, while in (64) the use of the Cleft sentence is a way for the journalist to comment on the claims of the media and democracy analyst in the quoted speech:36 (63) Speroni (parlando a Radio 24) se la prende proprio con il sindaco di Verona che, ammette “ha avuto un grandissimo consenso popolare”, ma “alcune sue posizioni sono al di fuor della linea del partito come ad esempio quando appoggia certe posizioni centraliste”. Quanto al congresso provinciale di Varese per Speroni è stata “la persona a non essere gradita, non la linea politica della Lega [...]” (ilsole24ore.com) ‘Speroni (speaking on Radio 24) gets angry with the mayor of Verona himself who, he concedes, “has gained tremendous public approval”, but “some of his positions lie outside the party policy as when, for instance, he endorses certain centralistic stances”. Regarding the provincial convention in Varese, according to Speroni, “it is the person that is not appreciated, not the policy of the Lega [Nord party] [...]” ’ (64) Other analysts expressed fears the result would dent the credibility of Sirleaf’s government. “The government will need to strengthen the belief and participation in democracy to win back the people,” said Abdullai Kamara, a media and democracy analyst based in Monrovia. “There was no competitor so it didn’t give people any impetus to go out and vote.” It was not only the “one party” race that failed to entice people to the polls, it was also fear. The day before the vote, the CDC organised a protest march intended to be peaceful at its headquarters, but it ended in bloodshed. (guardian.co.uk)

6. Conclusion This survey has revealed the distribution and the functions of different types of clefts in both Italian and English. These types were motivated by their different information structure properties: in particular, the different information statuses displayed by the clefted constituent and the cleft clause as well as the repartition of focus / background in the sentence. As a result, several classes were considered: Type 1a (whose clefted constituent is new and focalized while the cleft clause is given and backgrounded); Type 1b (characterized by a given, but focalized clefted constituent. This type also includes instances of contrastive topics and multiple foci constructions); Type 2 (which is the reverse image of Type 1a, with a fully backgrounded clefted constituent); and finally a Type 3 (reserved for all-new and all-focus cleft occurrences). The following are some final observations about specific divergences and similarities between Italian and English. First, I noted an overall functional overlap between the two languages: the information types and their discourse-pragmatic properties are basically the same. However, the distribution of these features is sometimes quite different. For instance, in Italian the most common cleft type is Type 1b, whereas in English Type 1a is the most widespread. The distribution of Type 2 and Type 3 in both languages is (more or less) symmetrical, but it is also more marginal in terms 36

This example is also interesting because it allows some considerations about the rhetorical effects achieved by clefts in discourse. The occurrence in (64) introduces a relevant alternative (fear besides the one-party race) in order to satisfy the open proposition expressed by the cleft clause; the use of a negative cleft and a truncated (i.e., without the cleft clause, see Hedberg 2000) cleft containing also suggests that the expert’s analysis is (at best) incomplete and indirectly implies the “expert” status of the journalist in that particular field.

22

of frequency. Type 2 is, however, slightly more common in Italian. Type 3 needs further explanation because the typology of the clefts I chose to include under this label is quite heterogeneous. Formulaic clefts seem typical of English, which is in line with the existing literature (Hasselgård 2004; Dufter 2009), whereas clefts presenting a “frame topic” occur more frequently in Italian. As far as the discourse-pragmatic functions are concerned, Italian uses Type 1a clefts to highlight the clefted constituent more than to stress an explicit contrast. On the contrary, Type 1b is preferably employed to signal an explicit opposition. In English, the explicit contrastive function is more frequent in both Type 1a and Type 1b. Type 2 clefts perform cohesive and metatextual functions in both Italian and English. Type 3 examples are specialized as rhetorical devices for starting a discourse in English (formulaic clefts), while in Italian they commonly provide a temporal setting, mostly at the beginning of a text. In summarizing the divergences and similarities between Italian and English, it is also necessary to reiterate that the goal of this paper is not to pursue an “absolute” comparison, but a contrastive analysis based on a very specific textual corpus. Put differently, my analysis also had to deal with language-external factors. In particular, the source of the data and the specific uses of clefts in journalistic texts suggest that how an article is structured in different journalistic traditions does matter and does affect the distribution of linguistic structures. More specifically, Italian articles, in which the main discourse topics are usually expressed and elaborated in different textual units, seem to promote a more cohesive use of clefts in the discourse. Consequently, Italian newspapers show a tendency to repeat given information, thus favoring a more consistent presence of Type 1b and Type 2 clefts, whose information structure is fully compatible with such strategies of text construction. References Agar Marco, Rocío. This vol. Pseudo-cleft sentences. Italian-Spanish in contrast. Akmajian, Adrian. 1970. On deriving cleft sentences from pseudo-cleft sentences. Linguistic Inquiry 1. 147–168. Banks, David. 1999. Decoding the information structure of journalistic clefts. Interface, Journal of Applied Linguistics 14(1). 3–24. Berretta, Monica. 1995. Ordini marcati dei costituenti maggiori di frase: una rassegna. Linguistica e Filologia 1. 125–170. Berretta, Monica 1996. Come inseriamo elementi nuovi nel discorso/3. Che mi fa paura è la nebbia. Italiano e Oltre 2. 116–122. Berretta, Monica. 2002. Quello che voglio dire è che: le scisse da strutture topicalizzanti a connettivi testuali. In Gianluigi Beccaria & Carla Marello (eds.), Dalla parola al testo. Scritti per Bice Mortara Garavelli, 15–31. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso. Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Ltd. Bonomi, Ilaria. 2002. L’italiano giornalistico dall’inizio del ’900 ai quotidiani on line. Firenze: Franco Cesati. Charnavel, Isabelle. 2011. On French un même and antispecificity. In Ingo Reich, Eva Orch & Dennis Pauly (eds.), Sinn und Bedeutung 15. Proceedings of the 2010 annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Semantik, 133–147. Saarbrücken: Saarland University Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1977. On wh-movement. In Peter W. Culicover, Thomas Wasow & Adrian Akmajian (eds.), Formal Syntax, 77–132. New York: Academic Press. Collins, Peter C. 1991. Cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions in English. London: Routledge. D’Achille, Paolo, Domenico Proietti & Andrea Viviani. 2005. La frase scissa in italiano: aspetti e problemi. In Paolo D’Achille & Iørn Korzen (eds.), Tipologia linguistica e società. Due 23

giornate italo-danesi di studi linguistici (Roma, 27-28 novembre 2003), 249–279. Firenze: Cesati. De Cesare, Anna-Maria. This vol. Cleft constructions in a cross-linguistic perspective. Towards an operational taxonomy. De Cesare, Anna Maria, Rocío Agar Marco, Laura Baranzini & Davide Garassino. This vol. Form and frequency of Italian cleft constructions in a corpus of electronic news. A comparative perspective with French, Spanish, German and English. Declerck, Renaat. 1988. Studies on copular sentences, clefts and pseudo-clefts. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Delin, Judy. 1989. Cleft constructions in discourse. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh dissertation. Delin, Judy. 1992. Properties of it-cleft presupposition. Journal of Semantics 9. 179–196. Delin, Judy & Jon R. Oberlander. 2005. Clefts constructions in contest. Some suggestions for research methodology. Ms., University of Stirling. http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/anglistik/langpro/projects/GeM/delin-publications.html (accessed 22 June 2013) Den Dikken, Marcel. 2009. Predication and specification in the syntax of cleft sentences, Ms. http://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-GraduateCenter/PDF/Programs/Linguistics/Dikken/predication_specification_Clefts_short_paper.pdf (accessed 22 January 2013) Dufter, Andreas. 2009. Clefting and discourse organization: Comparing Germanic and Romance. In Andreas Dufter & Daniel Jacob (eds.), Focus and background in Romance languages, 83– 121. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. É. Kiss, Katalin. 1998. Identificational focus versus informational focus. Language 74(2). 245–273 Ferrari, Angela, Luca Cignetti, Anna-Maria De Cesare, Letizia Lala, Magda Mandelli, Claudia Ricci & Carlo Enrico Roggia. 2008. L’interfaccia lingua-testo. Natura e funzioni dellʼarticolazione informativa dellʼenunciato. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso. Frison, Lorenza 1988. L’ordine degli elementi della frase e le costruzioni marcate. In: Lorenzo Renzi & Giampaolo Salvi (eds.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, vol. 1, 194– 225. Bologna: il Mulino. Gómez González, Maria de los Ángeles. 2007. ‘It was you that told me that, wasn’t it?ʼ It-clefts revisited in discourse. In Mike Hannay & Gerard J. Steen (eds.), Structural-functional studies in English Grammar, 103–140. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gundel, Jeanette. 2006. Clefts in English and Norwegian: Some implications for the grammarpragmatics interface. In Valéria Molnár & Susanne Winkler (eds.), The architecture of focus, 517–548. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Gundel, Jeanette. 2008. Contrastive perspectives on cleft sentences. In Maria de los Ángeles Gómez González, John Lachlan Mackenzie & Elsa M. González Álvarez (eds.), Languages and cultures in contrast and comparison, 69–87. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hasselgård, Hilde. 2004. Adverbials in it-cleft constructions, in Karin Aijmer & Bengt Altenberg (eds.), Advances in corpus linguistics, 195–212. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. Hedberg, Nancy. 2000. The referential status of clefts. Language 76(4). 891–920. Hedberg, Nancy. In press. Multiple focus and cleft sentences. In Andreas Haida, Katharina Hartmann & Tonies Veenstra (eds.), The structure of clefts. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hedberg, Nancy & Lorna Fadden. 2007. The information structure of it-clefts, wh-clefts and reverse wh-clefts in English. In Nancy Hedberg & Robert Zacharski (eds.), The grammar-pragmatics interface: Essays in honor of Jeanette K. Gundel, 49–76. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 24

Higgins, Francis R. 1973. The pseudo-cleft construction in English, Cambridge, Ma: MIT dissertation. Huber, Stefan. 2006. The complex function of it-clefts. In Valéria Molnár & Susanne Winkler (eds.), The architecture of focus, 549–578. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Huddleston, Rodney D. & Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds.). 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jespersen, Otto. 1954. A modern English grammar on historical principles. London: Allen & Unwin. Johansson, Mats. 2002. Clefts in English and Swedish: A contrastive study of it-clefts and wh-clefts in original texts and translations. Lund: University of Lund dissertation. Korzen, Iørn. This vol. Cleft Sentences. Italian-Danish in contrast. Krifka, Manfred. 1999. Additive particles under stress. In Devon Strolovitch & Aaron Lawson (eds.), Proceedings of the 8th Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference (MIT, May 8-10, 1998), 111–128. Cornell: CLC Publications. Krifka, Manfred. 2007. Basic notions of information structure. In Caroline Féry, Gilbert Fanselow & Manfred Krifka (eds.), Interdisciplinary studies on information structure 6, 13–55. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag. Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information structure and sentence form. Topic, focus, and the mental representation of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambrecht, Knud. 2001. A framework for the analysis of cleft constructions. Linguistics 39(3). 463–516. Metzeltin, Michael. 1989. La scissione relativa in italiano e nelle altre lingue romanze. In Fabio Foresti, Elena Rizzi & Paola Benedini (eds.), L’italiano fra le lingue romanze. Atti del XX Congresso SLI (Bologna, 25-27 settembre 1986), 151–169. Roma: Bulzoni. Metzeltin, Michael. 2010. Erklärende Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen: Satzkonstruktion und Satzinterpretation. Wien: Praesens Verlag. Molnár, Valéria. 1998. Topic in focus. On the syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics of the so-called ‘contrastive topic’ in Hungarian and German. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 45. 1–77. Panunzi, Alessandro. 2009. Strutture scisse e pseudoscisse: valori d’uso del verbo essere e articolazione dell’informazione nell’italiano parlato. In Angela Ferrari (ed.), Sintassi storica e sincronica dell’italiano. Subordinazione, coordinazione, giustapposizione. Atti del X Congresso SILFI 2008 (Basilea, 30 giugno-3 luglio 2008), 1121–1137. Firenze: Franco Cesati Panunzi, Alessandro. 2011. Frasi scisse. In Raffaele Simone, Gaetano Berruto & Paolo D’Achille (eds.), Enciclopedia dell’italiano, 1384–1387. Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana Giovanni Treccani. Percus, Orin. 1997. Prying open the cleft. In Kiyomi Kusumoto (ed.), Proceedings of the NorthEastern Linguistic Society 27 (McGill University, October 18-20, 1996), 337–351. Amherst, Mass.: GLSA Publications. Prince, Ellen F. 1978. A comparison of wh-clefts and it-clefts in discourse. In Language 54. 883– 906. Prince, Ellen F. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In Peter Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics, 223–256. New York: Academic Press. Reeve, Matthew. 2011. The syntactic structure of English clefts. Lingua 121(2). 142–171. Reinhart, Tanya. 1981. Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sentence topics. Philosophica 27(1). 53–94. Roggia, Carlo Enrico. 2009. Le frasi scisse in italiano. Struttura informativa e funzioni discorsive. Genève: Slatkine. Salvi, Giampaolo. 1991. Le frasi copulative. In Lorenzo Renzi & Giampaolo Salvi (eds.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, vol. 2, 163–189. Bologna: il Mulino. 25

Salvi, Giampaolo & Laura Vanelli. 2004. Nuova grammatica italiana, Bologna: il Mulino. Sornicola, Rosanna. 1988. It-clefts and wh-clefts: Two awkward sentence types. Journal of Linguistics 24(2). 343–379. Ward, Gregory & Betty J. Birner. 2004. Information structure. In Laurence R. Horn & Gregory Ward (eds.), Handbook of pragmatics, 153–174. Oxford: Blackwell. Wedgwood, Dan, Gergely Pethő & Ronnie Cann. 2006. Hungarian ‘focus position’ and English itclefts: The semantic underspecification of ‘focus’ readings, Ms. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~dan/web_HungFP_wpc.pdf (accessed 22 January 2013). Zimmermann, Malte & Edgar Onea. 2011. Focus marking and focus interpretation. Lingua 121. 1651–1670.

26