In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Clefts and their relatives
  • Marcel Den Dikken
Clefts and their relatives. By Matthew Reeve. (Linguistik aktuell/Linguistics today 185.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012. Pp. xiii, 223. ISBN 9789027255686. $149 (Hb).

Devising a deft account of clefts has defied linguists for decades. Past analyses have done little to make these constructions fit comfortably into the generative mold. On the contrary, they have typically excelled only at obfuscation and mystification: it as an expletive, the copula as a curious bit of matter with no obvious structural position or function in a ‘monoclausal’ structure with two finite verbs, an obligatorily extraposed relative clause of a peculiar type—and these are just the most eye-catching quirks. Clefts and their relatives (a revised version of Matthew Reeve’s University College London doctoral dissertation) not only provides much-needed clarity as to how the various ingredients of the cleft find their proper place in the syntactic structure, but it also presents an interesting argument to the effect that clefts are not quite alone in the world of syntax in featuring the kinds of structural relations that they do. The title of the book reflects this dual achievement thanks to the fact that both the technical and common or garden senses of the word ‘relatives’ apply. The book is a splendidly written1 demonstration of how rigorous application of syntactic diagnostics and adoption of a number of fairly simple analytical tools pave the way for the construction of an original and explicit structural account of the syntax of a recalcitrant construction. It not only offers a better fit with the properties of clefts documented in the previous literature but is also packed with remarkable empirical discoveries within and beyond the realm of the construction under discussion, and with exciting connections between seemingly unrelated data. The main emphasis of the discussion is on the syntax of clefts, but the semantics of these constructions is addressed as well. Throughout, the book contributes to our understanding of so-called specificational sentences. The semantics of the proposal is largely straightforward; the syntax is rather mechanical (the exploitation of the functional category Eq(uative)P in the syntax of specificational sentences is a case in point) and in some respects remarkably old-fashioned (exploiting rightward movement and right-adjunction, for instance, and relying heavily on the ways θ-relations are established, with Higginbotham’s θ-binding playing a central role). But my characterizing the syntactic proposal as mechanical should not be read as a fatal critique: as Bugs Bunny retorts in the classic cartoon Hair-raising Hare, just after having been smooched by a wind-up girl bunny, ‘Well, so it’s mechanical!’—and indeed, as long as the mechanics is sound, there is nothing wrong. In what follows, I put some of the mechanics to the test.

The four main ingredients of an English-type it-cleft are the subject pronoun it, the copula, the focused constituent in postcopular position, and the subordinate clause following the focused constituent. R’s central argument throughout the book is that the subordinate clause is a restrictive relative that, while semantically restricting the reference of the pronoun in subject position, syntactically belongs to the focused constituent but is obligatorily extraposed from that constituent. This statement encapsulates two striking mismatches, one between syntax and semantics (the relative clause syntactically belongs to the focused constituent but semantically restricts the subject pronoun) and the other within the syntax (the relative clause cannot form a surface constituent with what it is construed with in syntax). Resolving these mismatches turns out to be worth the effort: it clarifies the mystery of clefts in a multitude of ways, and leads to the establishment of a close syntactic and semantic relationship with a little-known construction that at first blush seems to bear no close family resemblance to the cleft (the only-relative construction illustrated by I only saw John that I like) and a partial relationship with a well-known construction that looks much more like the it-cleft on the surface (the it-extraposition construction instantiated by It is unfortunate that he said this). I save the discoveries about the relative clause of the [End Page 918] cleft and...

pdf

Share