Enumerative there-clauses and there-clefts: specification and information structure

ABSTRACT

This article develops a new account of enumerative there-clauses and enumerative there-clefts, which in the literature have tended to be reduced to purely pragmatic, informationally motivated constructions. They have also been treated as separate phenomena: Enumerative there-clauses have been argued to be part of the unitary existential construction, whose main function is to present hearer-new information. Enumerative there-clefts are viewed as focus-marking devices with semantically empty matrix. Against this, we analyse enumerative there-clauses as reduced enumerative there-clefts. We argue that they convey the same representational, or ideational, semantics. They are secondary specification constructions, which assert the existence of Values corresponding to the Variable, which is overtly coded in the cleft construction and implied in the reduced cleft. It is on the textual level that enumerative there-clauses and enumerative there-clefts contrast with each other. On the basis of quantified corpus study of spoken data, we show that the implied Variable is typically textually evoked in the preceding discourse, whereas the overt Variable typically contains new-anchored information.

KEYWORDS:

• English existential clauses
• English existential clefts
• specificational constructions
• focus
• discourse familiarity

Acknowledgments

The research reported on in this article was made possible by the FWO-project G065116N “Putting specificational there-clefts on the map: a data-based study of their syntax, semantics, prosody and pragmatics” and the sabbatical leave grant K801418N offered to Kristin Davidse. We sincerely thank the two anonymous referees and Lars Heltoft and Hartmut Haberland for their careful reading of earlier drafts and their incisive and helpful suggestions. We are also very grateful to Lena Karssenberg and Caroline Gentens for stimulating discussion of issues central to this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Following each attested example its source is indicated between brackets: Internet url, reference to the literature, or corpus. The following abbreviations are used for corpora: WordbanksOnline (WB) with indication of the subcorpus, Leuven Drama Corpus (LDC), London-Lund Corpus (LLC).

² MX and FX are acronyms anonymizing male and female proper names in the WB data.

³ When setting out our own analysis, we follow the Hallidayan tradition of using capitals for the semantic functions of grammatical constituents, e.g., Value and Variable, Subject and Complement, etc.

⁴ The notion of ‘list’ is used informally here. In Section 4, we discuss in more detail how, in our view, a set is inferred of all the instances corresponding to the relevant variable.

⁵ In our dataset, 47.5% of the ECs in which the semantic gap has Subject function have zero relative marker, as illustrated in example (2) above, There’s Paul and his wife Ø were there (WB).

⁶ Note that the terms value and variable are used differently in other approaches to clefts. For instance, for Lambrecht (2001), the variable refers only to the semantic gap in the open proposition and the value to the element filling it.

⁷ This is analogous to the predicative relative clause in secondary predication constructions like (16) and (20), which is dependent on both the predicate of perception and the NP designating the perceived entity.

⁸ For more extended argumentation, see Davidse (2000) and Davidse and Kimps (2016).

⁹ As suggested by these proportionalities, have-clefts also have a reduced variant. Because they have semantics-pragmatics similar to there-clefts, they occurred in our data. In the following example, the speaker switches from reduced have-cleft to there-cleft midway: But they were books that you wanted? – Yeah they’re they’re very good books that I want to read. And they’ve got there’s Damiano. (WB BrSpoken). Because of restrictions of space, we will not go further into have-clefts, but a comparison with there-clefts will be carried out in future research.

¹⁰ With reduced it-clefts, the Variable is not always as clearly evoked in the preceding text as in (4). For instance, the Variable in the reduced it-cleft in the final line of the example below can be inferred to be something like ‘that matters’. As we will see in Section 5, the Variable of reduced there-clefts is often not textually evoked in the preceding text either.

B: The patient’s complaining of breathlessness.

A: No, but that symptom may be associated with …

…

B: When you say symptom you’re already deducing.

A: Yes.

B: So it’s not just what the patient says. (LLC).

¹¹ The 5 attested tokens have a cleft relative clause that is non-finite or elliptical, e.g., I looked at Tottenham’s squad and it was fantastic, but I looked at our bench and we had Jason Euell, Jonatan Johansson and Franny Jeffers. Then there’s Jonathan Fortune, Bryan Hughes, and Kish (Radostin Kishishev) to come back from injury. (WB Times).

¹² In examples like Let him who is without sin throw the first stone the pronoun him does not refer to an individual but means ‘the one’ and can therefore be modified by a restrictive relative clause. In this context, such a reading is excluded: him refers to an individual, which is identified as the Value of ‘x who works for Sony’.

¹³ Another alternative focus placement that is in principle possible for both full and reduced clefts is on the finite verb, as illustrated in the following it-cleft, whether it \/is this daughter// who’s taken on the role of m/other//or whether it is f\ather//(LLC). No such examples were found for either EEs or ECs in the transcribed LLC data. More systematic study of focus placement in spoken data remains to be done.

¹⁴ The fourth subtype in Kaltenböck’s (2005) typology, ‘brandnew’, was not attested in our data. As we will see, the Variable in ECs may be new-anchored, but there will always be some link with the preceding text, it cannot just come out of the blue.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [G065116N and K801418N].

Notes on contributors

Kristin Davidse

Kristin Davidse is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Leuven. Her main research interest is the description of English grammar from a functional perspective. She has published on such topics as middle, existential and cleft constructions. She has also published on various processes of change such as grammaticalization, deictification and (inter)subjectification in the English noun phrase. She was one of the founding editors of the journal Functions of Language.

Ngum Meyuhnsi Njende

Ngum Meyuhnsi Njende has a B.A. in Modern Languages and Cultures (English, French, Italian and Spanish) and an MA in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics from the University of Pavia. She is currently based at the University of Leuven, where she is working on a PhD investigating the prosody, grammar, semantics and pragmatics of specificational there-clefts. She has presented her research at international meetings of ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English) and the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE).