We already saw that English, like many other
languages, has ways to indicate particular
information structure within a sentence. We
use that fronting operation, particularly
in order to indicate contrast with something
that's been said before, but there are other
constructions that can be used to gain particular
effects, and one's that's used is the it-cleft,
which is particularly used to convey focus,
that is, it’s used to convey that a particular
constituent conveys new information, while
another part of the sentence is old information,
information that's presupposed, which is assumed
to be agreed. An example of an it-cleft would
be something like "It was my dog that ate
the homework", where it's agreed that something
ate the homework, and the new information
that I've given you is that it was my dog.
The information structure of these is a very
interesting topic in itself, but for us, the
crucial point here is that that part that's
in focus has to be a constituent. So we can
use this, then, as a diagnostic for constituency.
In order to do that in practice, we have to
think of a kind of recipe for clefts. So one
way of thinking about the recipe is we start
from a sentence. So let's take the sentence
"My sister loves ripe Italian tomatoes" and
we want to know whether "ripe Italian tomatoes"
is a constituent or not. The way we’d construct
a cleft with that as the focus is first we’d
move it to the beginning of the sentence.
So if the sentence was "My sister loves ripe
Italian tomatoes", we'd move "ripe Italian
tomatoes", and we'd get "Ripe Italian tomatoes,
my sister loves."
Then we have to separate that part that we've
moved from the remnant of the sentence, the
sentence that it's moved from. We separate
it either with ‘that’ or with a relative
pronoun 'who' or 'which', depending on what's
appropriate. So then you'll wind up with "Ripe
Italian tomatoes that my sister loves". And
then the other part of the cleft is the 'it'
and the form of the verb 'be', so when you
preface those to what we've just done, you'll
wind up with "It is ripe Italian tomatoes
that my sister loves." That's a perfectly
grammatical sentence, so it's evidence that
"ripe Italian tomatoes" is a constituent in
the original sentence, where the original
sentence, you'll remember, was "My sister
loves ripe Italian tomatoes. So it's quite
a long process, but the reason it's important
to think of that whole recipe is that the
same sequence of words can appear as a constituent
in one context, but may not be a constituent
in another context. So when you're testing
a sequence of words in a sentence, you need
to test it relative to that sentence. So that's
why in this case we see that we start from
the sentence, the question was in the sentence
"My sister loves ripe Italian tomatoes" is
"Ripe Italian tomatoes" a constituent? And
so we construct the cleft on that sentence.
And that's crucial for using it as a diagnostic
for constituency.
We can use clefts to diagnose constituency
not only of noun phrases but also prepositional
phrases. So, for example, if we took the sentence
"My sister found some loose change behind
the sofa cushions" and I want to know is behind
the sofa cushions a constituent, the way I
could test that sentence would be to construct
the cleft "It was behind the sofa cushions
that my sister found some loose change." So
that's a grammatical sentence, and that tells
us that in the original sentence "My sister
found some loose change behind the sofa cushions",
“behind the sofa cushions" a constituent.
In fact, it's a PP.
There are other constituents in that sentence;
there are other clefts that you can make.
So you could say "It was my sister who found
some loose change behind the sofa cushions"
or "It was some loose change that my sister
found behind the sofa cushions." So each of
those different clefts pulls out a different
constituent from the original sentence. So
now we have quite a lot of information about
the constituency of that original sentence.
However, there are some limitations to this
as a diagnostic for constituency.
In particular, depending on the dialect of
English that you speak, it may be limited
as to whether you can focus Adjective Phrases
or Verb Phrases in this construction. So,
many dialects of English don't allow you to
focus either of those types of constituent.
So, uhm, "My sister is very tall"; "It's very
tall that my sister is." For some speakers
of English that's grammatical; for many it's
ungrammatical. So depending on the dialect
this constituency test is not available for
Adjective Phrases, and the same applies for
Verb Phrases. That doesn't actually mean that
in those dialects those sequences, so Adjective
Phrases, don't exist, that those aren’t
constituents.
It's the fact that it-clefts are limited in
what kind of constituents can be focused.
