Clefts in Cypriot Greek
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Yoryia Agouraki
Abstract
The aim of the paper is to investigate the syntactic and semantic structure of Cypriot Greek clefts. It is argued that the cleft clause denotes an unsaturated proposition. The clefted constituent saturates the missing part of that proposition. The clefted constituent is base-generated adjoined to the cleft clause and is not extracted out of the cleft clause. The impersonal copula is thematically vacuous. It c-selects the cleft clause with the adjoined clefted constituent. Late saturation for the clefted constituent is claimed to induce the focal interpretation of the lefted constituent. It-clefts are set within the more general frame of focusing strategies in Cypriot Greek. These include apparent clause-final foci, preverbal stressed operators and Clitic-Right-Dislocation.
Abstract
The aim of the paper is to investigate the syntactic and semantic structure of Cypriot Greek clefts. It is argued that the cleft clause denotes an unsaturated proposition. The clefted constituent saturates the missing part of that proposition. The clefted constituent is base-generated adjoined to the cleft clause and is not extracted out of the cleft clause. The impersonal copula is thematically vacuous. It c-selects the cleft clause with the adjoined clefted constituent. Late saturation for the clefted constituent is claimed to induce the focal interpretation of the lefted constituent. It-clefts are set within the more general frame of focusing strategies in Cypriot Greek. These include apparent clause-final foci, preverbal stressed operators and Clitic-Right-Dislocation.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Clefts in Cypriot Greek 13
- Lexical change, discourse practices and the French press 27
- Arbitrary subjects of infinitival clauses in European and Brazilian Portuguese 47
- Modal verbs in long verb clusters 59
- Changing pronominal gender in Dutch 71
- Meaning variation and change in Greek morphology 81
- Syntactic variation in German-English code-mixing 91
- Sources of phonological variation in a large database for Dutch dialects 103
- Broad vs. localistic dialectology, standard vs. dialect 119
- Intonational variation in Swiss German 135
- Morphological reduction in Aromanian 145
- Greek dialect variation 157
- Using electronic corpora to study language variation 169
- Language attitudes and folk perceptions towards linguistic variation 179
- Salience and resilience in a set of Tyneside English shibboleths 191
- New approaches to describing phonological change 205
- Variation and grammaticisation 215
- Towards establishing the matrix language in Russian-Estonian code-switching 225
- Index 241
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Clefts in Cypriot Greek 13
- Lexical change, discourse practices and the French press 27
- Arbitrary subjects of infinitival clauses in European and Brazilian Portuguese 47
- Modal verbs in long verb clusters 59
- Changing pronominal gender in Dutch 71
- Meaning variation and change in Greek morphology 81
- Syntactic variation in German-English code-mixing 91
- Sources of phonological variation in a large database for Dutch dialects 103
- Broad vs. localistic dialectology, standard vs. dialect 119
- Intonational variation in Swiss German 135
- Morphological reduction in Aromanian 145
- Greek dialect variation 157
- Using electronic corpora to study language variation 169
- Language attitudes and folk perceptions towards linguistic variation 179
- Salience and resilience in a set of Tyneside English shibboleths 191
- New approaches to describing phonological change 205
- Variation and grammaticisation 215
- Towards establishing the matrix language in Russian-Estonian code-switching 225
- Index 241
