Abstract
I take a new perspective on es-clefts in German, that focuses on how an es-cleft contributes to the discourse structure and how it does this differently than its canonical counterpart. My analysis is inspired by naturally occurring examples from German novels. It combines an adapted version of Roberts’ (2012) QUD stack and Velleman et al.’s (2012) approach to clefts. In particular, I present a model that includes implicit and potential questions into the QUD stack and I introduce the concept of expectedness, that I argue is crucial for the acceptability of clefts. I propose that the cleft addresses a question that came up in the preceding context but that is not as expected for the addressee to be answered at that point in the discourse compared to other questions. Those question that are more expected are answered with a canonical sentence. This approach is compatible with other functions that have been proposed for clefts, such as marking exhaustivity, maximality, or contrast. However, it can also account for examples where the cleft serves to establish discourse coherence.
I thank Edgar Onea, Lea Fricke, Maya Cortez Espinoza, the reviewers, and the audience of TbiLLC 2019 for valuable feedback and comments. The analysis of German es-clefts presented in this paper is based on my dissertation, Tönnis (2021), which includes a much more detailed version of this analysis.
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Notes
- 1.
Taken from the novel Herzenhören (Sendker (2012). Herzenhören. Heyne, München, p. 21.)
- 2.
The judgments for this example, as well as for examples (3)–(5), are confirmed by a couple of speakers but still have to be tested empirically.
- 3.
Thanks to Edgar Onea (p.c.) for raising this issue.
- 4.
An anonymous reviewer questions the proposed judgments for examples (3) and (5), suggesting that the cleft is still more acceptable than the canonical sentence, as in the other examples. If this was the case, it would still need to be explained why the clefts in (3) and (5) are less acceptable than the clefts in (2) and (4).
- 5.
I will later adopt a different version of CQ based on Simons et al. (2017).
- 6.
Even with narrow focus inside of the pivot, as in (i), I assume that the CQ is associated with the entire pivot. This is still a point of debate that I will not be able to solve in this paper (see Velleman et al. (2012) and É. Kiss (1998) among others for discussion).
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(i) a. It is LENA’S\(_{F}\) boyfriend who talked to Peter.
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b. CQ: Who talked to Peter?
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- 7.
I intentionally do not assume the cleft question Who is it who talked to Peter? as the CQ of the cleft. It is possible that the cleft question would be more adequate as the CQ of the cleft. However, the semantics and pragmatics of cleft questions are even less understood than of cleft assertions. Therefore, the predictions made on the basis of a clefted CQ would be unclear. For reasons of feasibility, I assume an unclefted CQ, which is well understood. Hopefully, the insights about cleft assertions from this paper can contribute to the investigation of cleft questions in future research.
- 8.
Note that expectedness is formulated from the addressee’s perspective. The speaker comes into play when s/he anticipates the expectations of the addressee and chooses her/his next discourse move accordingly.
- 9.
The term question refers to the discourse move of asking a question.
- 10.
I am not concerned with those priors here and will just assume them to be well-defined.
- 11.
Empirically, the EVs would probably not exactly add up to 1. This needs to be considered if this model is tested empirically.
- 12.
The definition uses ‘\(+\)’ for two different operations: an update as in \(C+p\) and for adding a variable to an EV.
- 13.
Strictly speaking, those variables should not be added or subtracted, but \(\alpha \), \(\beta \) and \((\alpha +\beta +\delta )\) should be increasing functions and \(\gamma \) should be a decreasing function, that take \(f_{e}(C)(q)\) as their argument.
- 14.
An anonymous reviewer pointed out that there are other non-default cases, besides clefts, that impose additional restrictions on acceptability, and that could be grouped with clefts. One such example is a sentence including the phrase by the way. I argue that we still need to assume different thresholds for each of these non-default cases, since by the way-sentences can address even less expected questions than clefts. Even in examples (3) and (5), in which the cleft in unacceptable, a by the way-sentence would be acceptable.
- 15.
In order to account for those cases where both a cleft and canonical sentence are acceptable, one would have to introduce a variable m, that is added to \(e_{def}\) in Definition 4. This would make sure that there is an interval of EVs \((e_{def},e_{def}+m)\) where both the cleft and the canonical sentence are acceptable. For presentational purposes in Sect. 4, I will use the simpler definition in this paper.
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Tönnis, S. (2022). It is not the Obvious Question that a Cleft Addresses. In: Özgün, A., Zinova, Y. (eds) Language, Logic, and Computation. TbiLLC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13206. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98479-3_7
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