The volume describes the frequency, the forms and the functions of different cleft construction types across two language families: the Romance languages (with discussion of Italian, French and Spanish data) and the Germanic languages (with focus on English, German, Swiss German and Danish).

This volume offers a critical appraisal of the tension between theory and empirical evidence in research on information structure. The relevance of ‘unexpected’ data taken into account in the last decades, such as the well-known case of non-focalizing cleft sentences in Germanic and Romance, has increasingly led us to give more weight to explanations involving inferential reasoning, discourse organization and speakers’ rhetorical strategies, thus moving away from ‘sentence-based’ perspectives. At the same time, this shift towards pragmatic complexity has introduced new challenges to well-established information-structural categories, such as Focus and Topic, to the point that some scholars nowadays even doubt about their descriptive and theoretical usefulness. This book brings together researchers working in different frameworks and delving into cross-linguistic as well as language-internal variation and language contact. Despite their differences, all contributions are committed to the same underlying goal: appreciating the relation between linguistic structures and their context based on a firm empirical grounding and on theoretical models that are able to account for the challenges and richness of language use.

What are the linguistic means for expressing different types of foci such as (narrow) information focus and contrastive focus in Romance languages, and why are there such differing views on such a presumably clear-cut research subject? Bringing together original expert work from a variety of linguistic disciplines and perspectives such as language acquisition and language contact, this volume provides a state-of-the-art discussion on central issues of focus realization. These include the interaction between prosody, syntax, and pragmatics, the typology of word order and intonation languages, the differentiation between focus and related notions such as contrast and presupposed modality, and the role of synchronic variation and change. The studies presented in this volume cover a broad range of Romance languages, including French, Italian, Portuguese, and different varieties of Spanish. Moreover, the book also offers new insights into non-Romance languages such as English, German, and Quechua.

This monograph is the first large-scale corpus analysis of French il y a clefts. While most research on clefts focusses on the English ‘prototypical’ it-cleft and its equivalents across languages, this study examines the lesser-known il y a clefts – of both presentational-eventive and specificational type – and provides an in-depth analysis of their syntactic, semantic and discourse-functional properties. In addition to an extensive literature review and a comparison with Italian c’è clefts and with French c’est clefts, the strength of the study lies in the critical approach it develops to the common definition of clefts. Several commonly used criteria for clefts are applied to the corpus data, revealing that these criteria often lead to ambiguous results. The reasons for this ambiguity are explored, thus leading to a better understanding of what constitutes a cleft. In this sense, the analysis will be of interest to specialists of Romance and non-Romance clefts alike.

Different components of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. It has been under debate what the actual range of interaction is and how we can most appropriately represent this in grammatical theory. The volume provides a general overview of various topics in the linguistics of Romance languages by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components and functions as a state-of-the-art report, but at the same time as a manual of Romance languages.

This volume provides a mechanism to uncover the extremely rich split-CP of V2 languages, in both root and embedded clauses, on the basis of theoretical arguments and empirical findings. The movement of the inflected verbal head is triggered to agree with the profiled informational value of the fronted XP. The V2 “constraint” shall thus be observed as a sum of micro-V2s, in which the inflected head creates Spec-Head configurations with the activated criterial positions in the relevant context. The “second linear” position of the verb results from the movement of the inflected verb to the highest activated criterial head. In other words, there is no “bottleneck effect”, but ordinary violations in terms of locality between fronted XPs. This monograph is aimed principally at postgraduate students and researchers interested in the description of natural languages adopting the guidelines of the Cartography of Syntactic Structures.

Clefts are intricate objects which, starting with Jespersen (1937), have motivated much work in descriptive and formal linguistics. Nonetheless, almost a century later their exact internal structure and status are still widely debated, therefore a multidisciplinary volume on this theoretically complex structure across different languages of the world is greatly needed. The articles featured in this volume follow an in-depth Introduction written by the editors, in which we offer a survey of the state-of-the-art on clefts by way of a strong contextualisation to the volume, including a number of robust empirical observations on the morphosyntactic and interpretational properties of these structures in numerous standard and non-standard Romance varieties, as well as a critical presentation of the contributions included in the volume. Among other things, the ten selected articles propose new insights into the widely-reported interpretational asymmetry between subject and object clefts, the features involved in their derivation, the ways in which the low and high peripheries are variously exploited in the derivation, the morphosyntactic and interpretational differences between clefts and their non-cleft counterparts, the role and formal properties of the copula, the notion of sub-extraction of features, a reconsideration of the very notion of focus via clefting, and much more. The volume, written by renown experts, offers an in-depth overview of the structure of it-clefts, taking into account different and complementary fields of the study of linguistics (cartography, quantitative methods, experimental investigations, nanosyntax, typology and dialectology) and robust empirical data from numerous languages including Romance varieties, Hungarian, Mandarin Chinese, and two Spanish- and French-lexifier creoles. Our belief is that the synchrony of clefts will only be appropriately understood once diachronic, typological, historical, experimental and dialectological aspects are all brought together. We offer through this volume a first attempt at providing such a variegated picture of the cross-linguistic morphosyntax of it-clefts.