It-clefts and wh-clefts: Prosody and pragmatics

It-clefts, basic wh-clefts and reversed wh-clefts differ from one another in the interplay of four variables: informativity, topicality, presupposition and weight. The findings of the present corpus-based study suggest that informativity, which has attracted significantly more attention in the literature than the others, is signalled primarily by discourse-recoverability rather than prosody. Prince's (1978) ‘known fact’ effect, found in new-presupposition it-clefts, is argued to arise from the non-negotiable nature of the new-yet-presupposed proposition expressed by the information in the relative clause. The data indicate that the same effect occurs, albeit less frequently, in reversed wh-clefts. Basic wh-clefts differ from the other two constructions in having a topical relative clause, one whose presupposed open-proposition has a strongly backgrounded character and lower communicative salience than that of the it-cleft. The three constructions are found to differ as well in their ‘weight’ properties.