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On the status of exhaustiveness in cleft sentences: An empirical and cross-linguistic study of English also-/only-clefts and Italian anche-/solo-clefts

De Cesare, Anna-Maria ; Garassino, Davide

In: Folia Linguistica, 2015, vol. 49, no. 1, p. 1-56

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    Titre
    • On the status of exhaustiveness in cleft sentences: An empirical and cross-linguistic study of English also-/only-clefts and Italian anche-/solo-clefts
    Auteur
    • De Cesare, Anna-Maria. University of Basel, Italian Linguistics, Maiengasse 51, 4056 Basel, Switzerland
    • Garassino, Davide. University of Basel, Italian Linguistics, Maiengasse 51, 4056 Basel, Switzerland
    Type de document
    • Postprint
    Identifiant OAI-PMH
    • oai:doc.rero.ch:325719
    Summary
    The goal of the paper is to shed new light on the semantics and pragmatics of cleft sentences by discussing the exhaustive interpretation typically associated with these complex syntactic structures. Based on a fine-grained analysis of the contexts in which "exhaustiveness” can be cancelled as well as reinforced by English also and only and Italian anche and solo, we claim that this meaning component associated with clefts in English and Italian is best accounted for in terms of a conventionalized conversational implicature. Our analysis is based on a corpus of authentic cleft occurrences collected from different written sources.