Cleft as a Marker of a Thetic Sentence: Evidence from Irish and Russian
Maria Shkapa
Moscow State University
Abstract
P. Mac Cana in his paper on Celtic word order notes that modern Celtic languages preserving VSO have a special construction where “the emphasis expressed by the abnormal word-order applies to the whole verbal statement and not merely, or especially, to the subject or object which takes the initial position” (Mac Cana 1973: 102). He gives examples from Welsh and Irish:
In recent literature sentences of this kind acquired the name thetic. Thetic (Sentence Focus) construction is a “sentence construction formally marked as expressing a pragmatically structured proposition in which both the subject and the predicate are in focus; the focus domain is the sentence, minus any topical non-subject arguments” (Lambrecht 1997: 190). Cleft construction “designed” for focussing one XP of a clause is used in the sentence above to mark the whole clause as focussed. The effect is achieved by extracting the usual topic of a sentence – its subject – from its normal position and thus ascribing to it and to the whole clause a new pragmatic function. Such usage of cleft is by no means universal (e.g. it is not possible in English) but meets a parallel in Russian eto-cleft which has the same two meanings – focussing an XP and forming a thetic sentence. These two usages are generally regarded as two different constructions having different syntactic structures (see [Kimmelmann 2007] and literature cited there). However, existence of a typological parallel enables us to view it as a case of pragmatic homonymy.