ESSLLI course

Theoretical and empirical approaches to cleft constructions

by Jun Chen and Swantje Tönnis
July 29 - August 2nd 2024, ESSLLI, Leuven (Belgium)

Slides

(to be uploaded before each session)

Content

This course aims to cross-linguistically investigate cleft constructions from theory-driven and empirical perspectives. An English cleft construction is a sentence of the form It is … who …, as exemplified in (1).

(1) It was Sally who danced.

We will first introduce hypotheses for capturing the meanings of clefts, their use conditions and their functions in discourse. In addition, we will discuss formal analyses that attempt to derive the cleft’s exhaustive inference (e.g., nobody other than Sally danced in (1)), and analyses demonstrating interactions between clefts and Questions Under Discussion (Roberts, 2012). Up-to-date psycholinguistic studies and corpus research which cross-linguistically test these theoretical claims (e.g., in Chinese, German, etc.) will also be introduced alongside. We will examine various experimental designs, and investigate empirical results, which seem to clash with theoretical predictions. The goal of this course is not only to convey state-of-the-art knowledge on cleft constructions to the students, but also to inspire and explore new theoretical and empirical ideas together with the students.