Frequency, Forms and Functions of Cleft Constructions in Romance and Germanic · Contrastive, Corpus-Based Studies by De Cesare, Anna-Maria -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

Index

Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Introduction

1 Cleft constructions in the Romance and Germanic languages: A contrastive perspective 2 Methodology used in the contributions of this volume 3 Structure of the book 4 Descriptive, theoretical and methodological issues discussed in the present volume Acknowledgments References

Part I. Italian Cleft Constructions in a Contrastive Perspective

Cleft constructions in a contrastive perspective - Towards an operational taxonomy

1 Introduction 2 Cleft construction: The classic taxonomy

2.1 Distinguishing Cleft constructions on the basis of the introducer

2.1.1 From English to other languages 2.1.2 On the external and internal boundaries of the classic taxonomy of clefts

2.2 Distinguishing Cleft constructions on the basis of the cleft clause

2.2.1 Nature of the cleft clause introducer and position of the cleft constituent 2.2.2 The status of cleft clauses opened by a WH-form

2.3 Classifying clefts with no English counterparts

2.3.1 Italian implicit Cleft sentences 2.3.2 German Cleft sentences with initial cleft constituent 2.3.3 French and Spanish Reverse pseudo-cleft sentences

3 Cleft constructions: A new taxonomy

3.1 A new taxonomy based on the position of the cleft constituent

3.1.1 Cleft constructions with initial, medial and final cleft constituent 3.1.2 Cleft constructions with initial, medial and final cleft constituent: Cross-linguisticevidence 3.1.3 Cleft constructions with initial, medial and final cleft constituent: Paradigm of forms

4 Concluding remarks References

Form and frequency of Italian Cleft constructions in a corpus of electronic news - A contrastive perspective with French, Spanish, German and English

1 Introduction 2 ICOCP Corpus

2.1 Corpus design

2.1.1 Multilingual corpus and corpus size 2.1.2 Written texts 2.1.3 Electronic texts 2.1.4 News items 2.1.5 Comparable texts

2.2 ICOCP corpus sections and subsections 2.3 Corpus query

3 Forms of the Cleft constructions in the ICOCP corpus

3.1 Cleft constructions with medial cleft constituent 3.2 Cleft constructions with final cleft constituent

4 Frequency assessment of Cleft constructions and data analysis

4.1 Overall frequency of Cleft constructions 4.2 Clefts constructions with medial cleft constituent 4.3 Cleft constructions with final cleft constituent 4.4 Cleft construction in written contemporary Italian: a few sociolinguistic remarks

5 Concluding remarks

5.1 New insights for language typology 5.2 Some open questions

References

Cleft sentences. Italian-English in contrast

1 Introduction 2 Italian and English Cleft sentences from a descriptive point of view 3 Information structure and Cleft sentences 4 Discourse functions of Italian and English Cleft sentences

4.1 Type 1a and Type 1b 4.2 Type 2 clefts 4.3 Type 3 clefts

5 Specific functions within journalistic texts 6 Conclusion References

Pseudo-cleft sentences. Italian-French in contrast

1 Introduction 2 The Pseudo-cleft sentence: The problem with its definition 3 Formal types of Pseudo-clefts in our corpus: Quantitative data

3.1 Formal types of Pseudo-clefts in Italian

3.1.1 Types of introducers 3.1.2 Subordinate clauses 3.1.3 Formal types of the cleft constituent

3.2 Formal types of Pseudo-cleft in French

3.2.1 Types of introducers and subordinates 3.2.2 The form of the copula 3.2.3 The cleft constituent: Formal types

3.3 Contrastive observations

4 Semantics and information structure of Pseudocleftsentences

4.1 Semantic pattern of Pseudo-cleft sentences 4.2 Information structure of Pseudo-cleft sentences in our corpus

5 Textual functions of Pseudo-cleft sentences in our corpus

5.1 The position of PC constructions in texts

6 Conclusions References

Pseudo-cleft sentences. Italian-Spanish in contrast

1 Introduction 2 A typology of Pseudo-cleft sentences

2.1 Definition of Pseudo-cleft sentences 2.2 Specificational function vs. predicative function 2.3 Types of Pseudo-cleft sentences

3 Quantitative analysis of Pseudo-cleft sentences

3.1 Frequency of use of Pseudo-cleft sentences and their subtypes 3.2 Formal differences between Pseudo-cleft sentences and their subtypes 3.3 A hypothesis on the quantitative differences between Italian and Spanish

4 Functions of the cleft constituent in Pseudo-cleft sentences

4.1 Ways of recovering the cleft constituent in the subsequent text 4.2 Informational and textual functions of Pseudo-cleft sentences

5 Conclusions References

Cleft sentences. Italian-Danish in contrast

1 Introduction 2 Cleft sentences in Danish

2.1 A short literature survey

2.2 Cleft sentences in Danish: Structural and syntactic features

2.2.1 Syntax and subclause connectives

2.2.2 Pronominal cleft constituents 2.2.3 The matrix verb 2.2.4 Other details

3 Cleft sentences in Italian (and other languages)

3.1 A short literature survey 3.2 Cleft sentences in Italian: Structural and syntactic features

3.2.1 Explicit and implicit Cleft sentences 3.2.2 The matrix verb

4 A Cleft sentence typology. General observations 5 The Italian and Danish Europarl Cleft sentences in comparison: linguistic material and textual function

5.1 The linguistic material of valency and adverbial cleft constituents 5.2 The textual function of valency and adverbial cleft constituents

5.2.1 The (“classic”) TYPE 1 Cleft sentence

5.2.1.1 Explicit contrast 5.2.1.2 Focalizing adverbs 5.2.1.3 Combined explicit contrast and focalizer 5.2.1.4 Negated cleft constituents 5.2.1.5 Repetitions 5.2.1.6 The cleft constituent introduces a new entity or concept 5.2.1.7 TYPE 1 Cleft sentences. Conclusion and a few statistics

5.2.2 The TYPE 2 Cleft sentence 5.2.3 The TYPE 3 Cleft sentence 5.2.4 The TYPE 4 Cleft sentence

6 Cleft sentence occurrences in another corpus of comparable texts 7 Conclusion References

Cleft sentences. A translation perspective on Italian and French

1 Introduction 2 Contrastive linguistics and translation

2.1 Differences between an original text and a translated text: Translation universals and “translationese” 2.2 Translation corpora and comparable corpora 2.3 Translation corpora of newspaper articles: Methodological issues

2.3.1 French and Italian newspaper corpora

3 Presentation of the corpora compiled for the study of Cleft sentences in French and Italian

3.1 Le Monde Diplomatique-Il Manifesto 3.2 Press Europ

4 Cleft sentences in translation

4.1 Monde Diplomatique-Manifesto corpus: Quantitative and qualitative results

4.1.1 Distribution of explicit and implicit Cleft sentences 4.1.2 Distribution of grammatical categories in Cleft sentences 4.1.3 Alternatives to clefts in translation

4.2 Press Europ bidirectional corpus: Quantitative and qualitative results

4.2.1 Distribution of explicit and implicit Cleft sentences 4.2.2 Distribution of grammatical categories in Cleft sentences 4.2.3 Alternatives to clefts in translation 4.2.4 Comparison between the MD-MAN-corpus and the PE-corpus

5 Translation corpora vs. comparable corpora: Concluding remarks References

Part II. Romance and Germanic Cleft Constructions in Contrast

Frequency, form and function of Cleft constructions in the Swiss SMS corpus

1 Introduction 2 Distribution and functions of Cleft constructions: State of the art and hypotheses 3 Database: The Swiss SMS corpus 4 Results

4.1 Overall results 4.2 Functions of IT-clefts

5 Discussion 6 Conclusion References

Inferential cleft constructions in translation - French c’est que in political texts

1 Introduction 2 Forms and functions of inferentials 3 Functions of inferential constructions in political texts

3.1 The corpus 3.2 Inferential c’est que-constructions: Contexts of use 3.3 Textual functions of c’est que-constructions

3.3.1 Argumentative use in a narrow sense 3.3.2 Explicative use

4 Inferential clefts in translation 5 Conclusion References

Motivating W(H)-Clefts in English and German: A hypothesis-driven parallel corpus study

1 Introduction 2 Remarks on the structure of W(H)-Clefts 3 The standard motivation of W(H)-Clefts

3.1 On Givenness and Topic-Comment structure 3.2 Linear synchronization of Topic and Comment

4 Motivating W(H)-Clefts: Benefits, costs and obstacles

4.1 Creating an IP boundary for separate nuclear accents: Phonological separation of Topic and Comment 4.2 Structural separation of propositional content and utterance comment 4.3 Linear synchronization of constituency and operator scope 4.4 Avoiding left-heavy constituent structure 4.5 An obstacle to the use of W(H)-Clefts: Horror aequi 4.6 The hypotheses tested in this study

5 Testing the hypotheses

5.1 The phonological separation hypothesis 5.2 The utterance comment hypothesis 5.3 The scope hypothesis 5.4 The structural hypothesis 5.5 The horror aequi-hypothesis 5.6 Summary

6 Determining correlations between variables: Multiple Correspondence Analysis 7 Summary and conclusions References

Subject index

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