Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2020 / An analysis of <i>all</i>-clefts

An analysis of <i>all</i>-clefts

Paper · 2020 · Jos Tellings

Summary

The paper studies English all-clefts, for instance a sentence reporting that the speaker's dinner consisted of nothing but a salad, with all heading the clause before the copula. These sentences imply that what they pick out is modest or insignificant, which the author calls the smallness effect. Near-identical sentences with everything carry no such inference. Tellings draws on constructed examples checked with native speakers, a few corpus items, and comparisons with exclusives and wh-pseudoclefts. From this he sets three requirements for any analysis:

  • all heads a true relative clause, not a free relative;
  • the precopular clause is built by syntactic movement;
  • the smallness effect comes from the mirative use of only.

The key new evidence involves all-clefts whose precopular part spans two clauses. There the smallness effect can be read high or low, and factive verbs and negation block the low reading, as movement would predict. The proposal adapts Boeckx's (2007) derivation of pseudoclefts. A plain sentence containing only undergoes focus and remnant movement and then relativization. All spells out the relativized only, and a copula is inserted. This beats Homer's (2019) superlative account, which cannot handle rank-order readings.

Key points

  • All-clefts are only specificational. "*All I ate for dinner was healthy" fails, while wh-pseudoclefts allow both specificational and predicational readings, and everything-RCs are basically predicational.
  • All-clefts show connectivity effects (reciprocal binding, Principle C, NPI licensing) just like their simple counterparts. Everything-RCs do not.
  • In the min/max framework of Coppock & Beaver (2014), all-clefts share with VP only an at-issue complement-exclusion ("nothing other than") component. This differs from it-clefts, which on Velleman et al. (2012) swap the at-issue status relative to only.
  • In bi-clausal cases, only can sit in the matrix clause ("John only said…") or the embedded clause ("…Mary only wanted…"). Factive regret and matrix negation block the embedded reading.
  • All-clefts also exist in Dutch (CGN corpus example), German, French, Italian and Spanish. The dialectal "alls-construction" is set aside.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Pairing all-sentences with everything-sentences that differ in one word cleanly isolates a construction-specific inference from ordinary universal quantification.
  • I2. A complex construction is analysed as derived from a simpler base sentence containing only, so its meaning and binding behaviour come from that base.
  • I3. Connectivity tests (reflexives, NPIs, Principle C) tell specificational copular sentences apart from predicational ones.
  • I4. The scope of the exclusive can attach high or low in embedded clauses, but factive verbs and negation act as barriers to the low reading.
  • I5. Everything-sentences behave as a built-in contrast case in which the smallness effect must not appear.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): Map "all + RC + be + X" to an exclusive frame asserting that nothing besides X fills the gap role, instead of a universal-quantifier frame.
  • I2 (world): Normalize an all-cleft to its canonical form "Ed only eats a salad" before updating the world, so "Did Ed eat anything else?" gets a confident "no."
  • I3 (tree): When the copular subject is an all-relative with a gap, attach the postcopular phrase as the filler of that gap, so frames see the real verb–object relation.
  • I4 (frames): Generate both scope readings for all-clefts over say-type verbs, and prune the low one under factives or matrix negation.
  • I5 (learn): Add such minimal pairs as negative controls in evaluation, checking that exclusive or smallness frames fire for all and stay silent for everything.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Utrecht UniversityUtrecht · Netherlands21 works · 1,281 citations

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 260 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Jos Tellings. 2020. An analysis of <i>all</i>-clefts. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.1092

@article{tellings2020analysis,
  title = {{An analysis of <i>all</i>-clefts}},
  author = {Jos Tellings},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.1092},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1092}
}

References

35 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Beaver, David & Brady Clark. 2008. Sense and sensitivity. How focus determines meaning. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444304176 ↗
  2. Bhatt, Rajesh. 2002. The raising analysis of relative clauses: Evidence from adjectival modification. Natural Language Semantics 10. 43–90. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1015536226396 Boeckx, Cedric. 2007. Pseudoclefts: A fully derivational account. In Josef Bayer, Tanmoy Bhattacharya & M.T. Hany Babu (eds.), Linguistic theory and South Asian languages, 29–40. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/la.102.05boe ↗
  3. Bonelli, Elena. 1992. ‘All I’m saying is…’: The correlation of form and function in pseudo-cleft sentences. Literary and Linguistic Computing 7. 30–42. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/7.1.30 Bošković, Željko. 1997. Pseudoclefts. Studia Linguistica 51(3). 235–277. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1111/1467-9582.00022 Büring, Daniel & Manuel Križ. 2013. It’s that, and that’s it! Exhaustivity and homogeneity presuppositions in clefts (and definites). Semantics and Pragmatics 6. 1–29. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.6.6 ↗
  4. Caponigro, Ivano. 2003. Free not to ask: On the semantics of free relatives and wh-words cross-linguistically. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA dissertation. find
  5. Carlson, Gregory. 1977. Amount relatives. Language 53. 520–542. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/413175 Collins, Peter. 1991. Cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions in English. New York: Routledge. ↗
  6. Coppock, Elizabeth & David Beaver. 2014. Principles of the exclusive muddle. Journal of Semantics 31(3). 371–432. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/fft007 ↗
  7. De Cesare, Anna-Maria. 2014. Cleft constructions in a contrastive perspective. In Anna-Maria De Cesare (ed.), Frequency, forms and functions of cleft constructions in Romance and Germanic, 9–48. Paris: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110361872.9 den Dikken, Marcel. 2017. Specificational copular sentences and pseudoclefts. In Martin Everaert & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds.), The Blackwell companion to syntax (2nd edition), 1–138. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1002/9781118358733.wbsyncom001 den Dikken, Marcel, André Meinunger & Chris Wilder. 2000. Pseudoclefts and ellipsis. Studia Linguistica 54(1). 41–89. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9582.00050 ↗
  8. DeVeaugh-Geiss, Joseph, Malte Zimmermann, Edgar Onea & Anna-Christina Boell. 2015. Contradicting (not-)at-issueness in exclusives and clefts: An empirical study. In Sarah D’Antonio, Mary Moroney & Carol Rose Little (eds.), Proceedings of SALT 25, 373–393. Washington, DC: Linguistic Society of America. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt. v25i0.3054 DeVeaugh-Geiss, Joseph, Swantje Tönnis, Edgar Onea & Malte Zimmermann. 2018. That’s not quite it: An experimental investigation of (non-)exhaustivity in clefts. Semantics and Pragmatics 11. 3: 1–44. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/sp ↗
  9. Douglas, Jamie. 2017. Unifying the that-trace and anti-that-trace effects. Glossa 2(1). 60: 1–28. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.312 ↗
  10. Erdmann, Peter. 1990. Fokuskonstruktionen im Deutschen und Englischen. In Claus Gnutzmann (ed.), Kontrastive Linguistik, 69–83. Bern: Peter Lang. find
  11. Grosu, Alexander & Fred Landman. 1996. Carlson’s Last Puzzle: Will it go the way of Fermat’s Last Theorem? In Edit Doron & Shuly Wintner (eds.), Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference and the Workshop on Discourse, 129–142. Jerusalem: Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics. find
  12. Grosu, Alexander & Fred Landman. 1998. Strange relatives of the third kind. Natural Language Semantics 6. 125–170. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008268401837 ↗
  13. Haegeman, Liliane. 2009. The movement analysis of temporal adverbial clauses. English Language & Linguistics 13. 385–408. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674309990165 ↗
  14. Hallman, Peter. 2016. ‘All’ and ‘every’ as quantity superlatives. In Mary Moroney, Carol-Rose Little, Jacob Collard & Dan Burgdorf (eds.), Proceedings of SALT 26, 506–525. Washington, DC: Linguistic Society of America. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt. v26i0.3798 Heycock, Caroline & Anthony Kroch. 1999. Pseudocleft connectedness: Implications for the LF interface level. Linguistic Inquiry 30(3). 365–397. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1162/002438999554110 Homer, Vincent. 2019. That’s all. In Richard Stockwell, Maura O’Leary, Zhongshi Xu & Z. L. Zhou (eds.), Proceedings of WCCFL 36, 1–21. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. ↗
  15. Horn, Laurence. 1981. Exhaustiveness and the semantics of clefts. In Victoria Burke & James Pustejovsky (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 11, 125–142. Amherst, MA: GLSA, University of Massachusetts. find
  16. Horn, Laurence. 1996. Exclusive company: Only and the dynamics of vertical inference. Journal of Semantics 13. 1–40. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/13.1.1 ↗
  17. Hunter, Julie, Nicholas Asher, Brian Reese & Pascal Denis. 2006. Evidentiality and intensionality: Two uses of reportative constructions in discourse. In Candy Sidner, John Harpur, Anton Benz & Peter Kühnlein (eds.), Proceedings of the workshop on constraints in discourse, 99–106. Maynooth: National University of Ireland. find
  18. Kay, Paul. 2002. Patterns of coining. Ms., UC Berkeley. find
  19. Larson, Richard. 1987. “Missing prepositions” and the analysis of English free relative clauses. Linguistic Inquiry 18(2). 239–266. find
  20. McCloskey, James. 2000. Quantifier float and wh-movement in an Irish English. Linguistic Inquiry 31(1). 57–84. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/002438900554299 ↗
  21. McNally, Louise. 2008. DP-Internal only, amount relatives, and relatives out of existentials. Linguistic Inquiry 39(1). 161–169. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.2008.39.1.161 ↗
  22. Partee, Barbara. 1986. Ambiguous pseudoclefts with unambiguous be. In Stephen Berman, Joyce McDonough & Jae-Woong Choe (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 16, 354–366. Amherst, MA: GLSA, University of Massachusetts. find
  23. Putnam, Michael & Marjo van Koppen. 2009. C-agreement or something close to it: Some thoughts on the ‘alls-construction’. In Artemis Alexiadou, Jorge Hankamer, Thomas McFadden, Justin Nuger & Florian Schäfer (eds.), Advances in comparative Germanic syntax, 41–58. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/la.141.03cag ↗
  24. Putnam, Michael & Marjo van Koppen. 2011. All there is to know about the alls-construction. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 14(2). 81–109. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-011-9044-1 Sharvit, Yael. 1999. Connectivity in specificational sentences. Natural Language Semantics 7. 299–339. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008390623435 ↗
  25. Sharvit, Yael. 2015. The onliest NP: Non-definite definites. In Ulrike Steindl, Thomas Borer, Huilin Fang, Alfredo García Pardo, Peter Guekguezian, Brian Hsu, Charlie O’Hara & Iris Chuoying Ouyang (eds.), Proceedings of WCCFL 32, 171–190. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. find
  26. Sportiche, Dominique. 2011. French relative qui. Linguistic Inquiry 42(1). 83–124. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/LING_a_00029 ↗
  27. Traugott, Elizabeth. 2008. ‘All that he endeavoured to prove was…’: On the emergence of grammatical constructions in dialogic contexts. In Robin Cooper & Ruth Kempson (eds.), Language in flux: Dialogue coordination, language variation, change and evolution, 143–177. London: King’s College Publications. find
  28. Velleman, Dan Bridges, David Beaver, Emilie Destruel, Dylan Bumford, Edgar Onea & Liz Coppock. 2012. It-clefts are it (inquiry terminating) constructions. In Anca Chereches (ed.), Proceedings of SALT 22, 441–460. Washington, DC: Linguistic Society of America. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v22i0.2640 ↗
  29. Wood, Jim. 2013. The alls construction. Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America. (Available online at http://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/alls-construction. Accessed on 2020-09-17). Updated by Tom McCoy (2015), Katie Martin (2018), and Oliver Shoulson (2020). ↗
  30. Zanuttini, Raffaella & Paul Portner. 2003. Exclamative clauses: At the syntax-semantics interface. Language 79(1). 39–81. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2003.0105 ↗
  31. Zeevat, Henk. 2009. “Only” as a mirative particle. In Arndt Riester & Edgar Onea (eds.), Focus at the syntax-semantics interface, 121–141. Stuttgart: University of Stuttgart. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18419/opus-5717 ↗
  32. How to cite this article: Tellings, Jos. 2020. An analysis of all-clefts. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1): 111. 1–25. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1092 ↗
  33. Submitted: 17 September 2019 find
  34. Published: 12 November 2020 find
  35. Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tellings-2020-analysis-i-all-i-clefts/