Clefts: Quite the contrary!

Abstract

Much of the previous literature on English it-clefts – sentences of the form ‘It is X that Z’ – concentrates on the nature and status of the exhaustivity inference (‘nobody/nothing other than X Z’). This paper concerns the way in which it-clefts signal contrast. We argue that it-clefts signal a type of contrast that does not merely involve a salient antecedent, as on more traditional characterizations of contrast such as those of e.g. Kiss (1998) and Rooth (1992), but also involves a conflict between the speaker’s and the hearer’s beliefs, as under the characterization of contrast given by Zimmermann (2008, 2011), which we term contrariness. Results of a felicity judgment experiment suggest that clefts do have a preference for contrariness, and one which has a gradient effect on felicity judgments: the more strongly interlocutors appear committed to an apparently false notion, the better it is to repudiate them with a cleft.https://4f669968-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/sinnundbedeutung21/proceedings-preprints/Destruel-Beaver-Coppock-SuB2016-FINAL.pdf?attachauth=ANoY7cpfzckWBy6psH6QCmbOCeXWS2nlL4bGgHHud2GpjKB1YQolksB00UtYzuvPRANOzWvWgfHdLZ7BP8zDYcT5wYIwr-1dBjw2g0-TC0Bic1ByVfjgj68pPdE9novwXm427ehkZI1E59JmiIvJnBKGxzYpI_AxMcKc-gEQuzu6DHXwJoLtzwm1FzFaHEX1LBq_yFSDgBzZajW2AHEFSiqmz1OVPTICm4zLB30AaHUxrtTBhWI1r0pmmX42IwVk9DtYfp0m6uvrsJLxJuvDhBPe-l3sJmHPcH2qhAtt6wqVMT7b-H6wX08=&attredirects=0Published versio