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On the status of exhaustiveness in cleft sentences: An empirical and cross-linguistic study of English also-/only-clefts and Italian anche-/solo-clefts

  • Anna-Maria De Cesare EMAIL logo and Davide Garassino
Published/Copyright: April 28, 2015
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Folia Linguistica
From the journal Folia Linguistica Volume 49 Issue 1

Abstract

The goal of the paper is to shed new light on the semantics and pragmatics of cleft sentences by discussing the exhaustive interpretation typically associated with these complex syntactic structures. Based on a fine-grained analysis of the contexts in which “exhaustiveness” can be cancelled as well as reinforced by English also and only and Italian anche and solo, we claim that this meaning component associated with clefts in English and Italian is best accounted for in terms of a conventionalized conversational implicature. Our analysis is based on a corpus of authentic cleft occurrences collected from different written sources.

Keywords: cleft sentences; exhaustiveness; conversational implicature; contrastive analysis; English–Italian; corpus study

Article Note:

Both authors are jointly responsible for the content of the paper. The writing has been divided up as follows: AMDC is responsible for Section 3 and DG for Section 4.3; the two authors wrote together Sections 1, 2, 4.1, 4.2 and 5.

Acknowledgments

This paper has been written with the financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project PP00P1-133716/1, Italian Constituent Order in a Contrastive Perspective), to which we express our gratitude. We would like to thank Daniel Jacob for having invited us to present our first observations on the subject at the Linguistisches Forschungskolloquium of the Romanisches Seminar of the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität (Freiburg im Breisgau) in May 2012. The discussion following the paper has been a very valuable one. We would also like to thank our colleague Carlo Enrico Roggia for handing us his collection of clefts extracted from the LISUL corpus (a private corpus assembled at the University of Lausanne). Finally, we are indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions, as well as to the editorof Folia Linguistica, Hubert Cuyckens, for his careful editing of the manuscript.

Corpora

The authentic cleft sentences examined in this article were drawn from a variety of written corpora. Our empirical analysis was, however, mostly based on the following two sources:

  1. The English and Italian subsections of the Italian Constituent Order in a Contrastive Perspective (ICOCP) corpus, a collection of written journalistic texts in which 95 English and 219 Italian cleft sentences were attested. The English subpart of the ICOCP corpus includes 425,000 tokens, the Italian subpart 600,000 tokens (for a detailed description of the corpus, see De Cesare et al. 2014: 52–62).

  2. A collection of 320 Italian cleft sentences extracted from the LISUL corpus (the acronym LISUL stands for Linguistica italiana sincronica all’università di Losanna; this is a corpus consisting of roughly 1 millionwords from different types of written journalistic and academic texts).

    As already mentioned in Section 5.2, in order to retrieve Italian adjectival solo-clefts (which do not occur either in (i) or in (ii)), we relied on two other much larger corpora:

  3. The online corpus of the Italian daily La Repubblica which contains approximately 380 million tokens. The corpus can be consulted online (http://dev.sslmit.unibo.it/corpora/corpus.php?path=&name=Repubblica).

  4. The Italian corpus CORpus di Italiano Scritto (CORIS) containing approximately 130 million tokens. It is possible to consult this corpus online as well (http://dslo.unibo.it/coris_ita.html).

Finally, in order to retrieve additional data, we also relied on (v) the Internet via Google searches of specific cleft formats.

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Received: 2013-11-28
Revised: 2013-3-27
Revised: 2013-10-8
Accepted: 2013-12-1
Published Online: 2015-4-28
Published in Print: 2015-5-1

©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  3. On the status of exhaustiveness in cleft sentences: An empirical and cross-linguistic study of English also-/only-clefts and Italian anche-/solo-clefts
  4. A regional survey of the relationship between vowel and consonant duration in Shetland Scots
  5. The long and short of verb alternations in Mauritian Creole and Bantu languages
  6. Associated motion in Mojeño Trinitario: Some typological considerations
  7. An existential expletive: fii of Jordanian Arabic
  8. Prosodic phrasing of relative clauses with two possible antecedents in Spanish: A comparison of Spanish native speakers and L1 Basque bilingual speakers
  9. Variable coding and object alignment in Spanish: A corpus-based approach
  10. Displaced directives: Subjunctive free-standing que-clauses vs. imperatives in Spanish
  11. Book Reviews
  12. David Fertig: Analogy and morphological change
  13. Adam Głaz. Lublin: Extended Vantage Theory in Linguistic Application: The Case of the English Articles
  14. Andreas H. Jucker & Irma Taavitsanen: English historical pragmatics
https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2015-0001
Keywords for this article
cleft sentences; exhaustiveness; conversational implicature; contrastive analysis; English–Italian; corpus study

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  3. On the status of exhaustiveness in cleft sentences: An empirical and cross-linguistic study of English also-/only-clefts and Italian anche-/solo-clefts
  4. A regional survey of the relationship between vowel and consonant duration in Shetland Scots
  5. The long and short of verb alternations in Mauritian Creole and Bantu languages
  6. Associated motion in Mojeño Trinitario: Some typological considerations
  7. An existential expletive: fii of Jordanian Arabic
  8. Prosodic phrasing of relative clauses with two possible antecedents in Spanish: A comparison of Spanish native speakers and L1 Basque bilingual speakers
  9. Variable coding and object alignment in Spanish: A corpus-based approach
  10. Displaced directives: Subjunctive free-standing que-clauses vs. imperatives in Spanish
  11. Book Reviews
  12. David Fertig: Analogy and morphological change
  13. Adam Głaz. Lublin: Extended Vantage Theory in Linguistic Application: The Case of the English Articles
  14. Andreas H. Jucker & Irma Taavitsanen: English historical pragmatics
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