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Project

Putting specificational there-clefts on the map: a data-based investigation of their grammar, semantics, prosody and pragmatics

In the mainstream literature on English, there-clefts have been very much neglected. Only presentational-eventive there-clefts, which introduce a whole new event, have been recognized, e.g.

"there’s a family of brush turkeys have moved in."

In this project, we will develop grammatical, prosodic and semantic-pragmatic arguments, grounded in a strongly data-based approach, for recognizing specificational there-clefts, i.e. clefts that specify a Value for a Variable. We distinguish two types which hinge on whether the matrix is an enumerative or a canonical entity-existential. Enumerative there-clefts enumerate one or more instances as corresponding to the Variable, e.g.

"You are quite right David, it was engineered, seems there's only me and you who can see this".

Quantifying there-clefts indicate the quantity of instantiation of the variable, e.g.

"Look at the shape of it. There’s only one thing that’s that shape."

Special attention will go to their prosody, as revelatory of not only their information structure but also of their binary Value-Variable structure.

Date:1 Jan 2016 →  31 Dec 2019
Keywords:specificational, there-clefts, data-based, grammar, semantics, prosody, pragmatics
Disciplines:Language studies, Literary studies