A Multi-Level Account of Cleft Constructions in Discourse

What it is about

The paper asks when a speaker should use a cleft ("It was the mango that Martin ate") instead of a plain sentence, and which of the three cleft types to use. It rejects three common explanations: Given-in-complement and New-in-head, accent on the head marking focus, and fixed serial order. In a corpus of 587 clefts (150 of each type analysed in detail), 90% of it-clefts, 92% of wh-clefts and all reverse wh-clefts have New information in the complement, while only 10% of it-clefts and 8% of wh-clefts have a sole nucleus on the head. The positive account has three conditions: the presupposed variable must be instantiated by the head, the instance must be maximal in the context, and it must be novel. A two-stage generation procedure follows: first decide whether a cleft is needed, then choose the type by syntactic and information-structure constraints (for example, wh-clefts cannot presuppose New information, and only it-clefts take "not until" as head).

Ideas

• I1. A generator check for clefts in en/src/lin.rs: before a cleft is emitted, test the three conditions against the world's entity set of the context (is the head the only entity that satisfies the presupposed predicate; is the fact new). Test on the paper's contrast between the bad "John won and it was John who won" and the acceptable "I knew someone won, ... but I didn't know it was John who won".
• I2. A constraint table for cleft types in a BTreeMap: wh-cleft refuses New information in its presupposition; wh-cleft and reverse wh-cleft differ in which head types they accept (the paper gives bare infinitives for wh-clefts and pronominal "it" or "which" for reverse wh-clefts); it-cleft alone takes "NP + not until" as head. Check the table against the paper's examples (15) and (17) to (21), with the starred forms as negative controls.
• I3. Do not let accent decide focus. A negative control in prag: a cleft whose head has no accent should still be marked as contrastive or focused by the rule. The paper's figures show accent is a poor cue, so a rule that depends on accent alone must score worse on a set of clefts.
• I4. Operational Given/New from the frames: an argument, predicate or event counts as New if it is in the frame of the sentence and not in the frame of the preceding context (the paper's definition). Compute it for each cleft in the school texts and report the share of clefts with New information in the complement, to compare with the paper's 90%.

For Mova

The chapters are languages/en/29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure.md (clefts, information structure, focus) and languages/en/36-discourse-relations.md (presupposition and discourse function). The code is en/src/lin.rs for generation of clefts and word order, world/src/qud.rs for the context, prag/src/roles.rs for the presupposed role, and world/src/knowledge.rs for the test texts. The measures are the generator's acceptance on the paper's example set and the Given/New share against the paper's corpus figures, run twice to confirm it is identical.

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/997939.997954

@inproceedings{delin1990multi,
  title = {{A Multi-Level Account of Cleft Constructions in Discourse}},
  author = {Delin, J. L.},
  booktitle = {COLING 1990 Volume 2: Papers presented to the 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1990},
  doi = {10.3115/997939.997954},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/997939.997954}
}

References

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