The cleft construction: A formal definition

The paper addresses the task of systematizing linguistic notions and corresponding terminology: it presents a rigorous definition of the notion of cleft construction. The study is carried out in the theoretical framework of the Meaning-Text approach. The substantive and formal requirements on a rigorous linguistic definition are formulated. The cleft construction in English is described as a basis for the definition: the semantic [SemR], the deep-syntactic [DSyntR] and the surface-syntactic [SSyntR] representations of three English cleft sentences are given, as well as five formal DSyntR ⇔ SSyntR rules for the expression of a focalized Rheme by the cleft construction. The cleft construction is defined as a particular type of linguistic sign; it is a grammatical (surface-syntactic) idiom, headed by a lexeme of the copula verb ‘be’ with fairly complex syntactics. An overview of cleft constructions in several languages structurally different from English-French, Spanish, German, Irish, Kinyarwanda, and Mandarin Chinese-follows. Finally, pseudo-cleft sentences are considered; in contrast to cleft sentences, they are special only from a semantic, but not from a syntactic viewpoint (there is no term * pseudo-cleft construction ): they present a particular organization of the starting meaning. The results of the paper: 1) It proposes a formal notion of cleft construction, which allows the researchers to distinguish-in various languages-syntactic phenomena that serve the same informational purpose (namely, the expression of a focalized Rheme or Theme), but are structurally different; in this way the paper contributes to General syntax. 2) It provides a sketch of a formal description of the cleft construction in English, thus contributing to English studies.