It-Cleft Dependency: Strong of Weak?

Abstract

Chai, Myong-Hi. 2003. It-Cleft Dependency: Strong or Weak? Korean Journal of Linguistics, 28-2, 163-183. The it-cleft construction is a representative way of giving a focus on a constituent in English clauses. To carry out the function, the it-cleft construction divides the original clause into two parts, i.e. the focused part and the presupposition part. It has been noted that the second part is always missing one element and that there is a certain degree of dependency between the focused element and the missing element of the presupposition part. However, it is controversial how much they depend on each other. In this paper, we show that the two previous approaches, i.e. strong and weak dependency approaches, are not precise enough to capture the dependency in that construction, and propose an "intermediate" dependency approach based on empirical data. That is, we argue the two parts need not share the whole LOC value nor just IND value, instead they share the CAT value. Following the lexicalist tradition of HPSG, we represent this dependency courtesy of the lexical property of the verb beCLEFT. (Chosun College of Science & Technology)