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The Referential Status of Clefts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Nancy Hedberg
Nancy Hedberg*
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
*
Linguistics Dept. Simon Fraser University Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6 Canada [hedberg@sfu.ca]
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Abstract

This article has two main parts. In the first, the subject pronoun in a cleft sentence together with the cleft clause is shown to function pragmatically as a discontinuous definite description. Applying the givenness hierarchy (Gundel et al. 1993) makes it possible to explain the distribution of this-clefts and that-clefts in discourse, and predicts the more frequent occurrence of it-clefts. Clefts also semantically share existential and exhaustiveness conditions with definite descriptions. The second part presents a new syntactic analysis of clefts, which treats the cleft clause as an extraposed complement of the cleft subject pronoun, adjoined to the clefted constituent.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 76 , Issue 4-Part1 , December 2000 , pp. 891 - 920
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 Linguistic Society of America

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