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Journal of Semantics Advance Access originally published online on August 20, 2008
Journal of Semantics 2008 25(4):345-380; doi:10.1093/jos/ffn007
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Syntax and Semantics of It-Clefts: A Tree Adjoining Grammar Analysis

Chung-Hye Han and Nancy Hedberg

Simon Fraser University

Correspondence: CHUNG-HYE HAN AND NANCY HEDBERG, Department of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby BC V5A 1S6, Canada, e-mail: chunghye{at}sfu.ca, hedberg{at}sfu.ca


  Abstract

In this paper, we examine two main approaches to the syntax and semantics of it-clefts as in ‘It was Ohno who won’: an expletive approach where the cleft pronoun is an expletive and the cleft clause bears a direct syntactic or semantic relation to the clefted constituent, and a discontinuous constituent approach where the cleft pronoun has a semantic content and the cleft clause bears a direct syntactic or semantic relation to the cleft pronoun. We argue for an analysis using Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) that captures the best of both approaches. We use Tree-Local Multi-Component Tree Adjoining Grammar to propose a syntax of it-clefts and Synchronous Tree Adjoining Grammar (STAG) to define a compositional semantics on the proposed syntax. It will be shown that the distinction TAG makes between the derivation tree and the derived tree, the extended domain of locality characterizing TAG and the direct syntax–semantics mapping characterizing STAG allow for a simple and straightforward account of the syntax and semantics of it-clefts, capturing the insights and arguments of both the expletive and the discontinuous constituent approaches. Our analysis reduces the syntax and semantics of it-clefts to copular sentences containing definite description subjects, such as ‘The person that won is Ohno’. We show that this is a welcome result, as evidenced by the syntactic and semantic similarities between it-clefts and the corresponding copular sentences.

Received for publication 17 December 2007. Revision received 8 April 2008. Accepted for publication 6 May 2008.


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