CONTRASTIVE EMPHASIS AND CLEFT SENTENCES

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how languages express contrastive emphasis. It is argued that all:ontrastively emphasized constructions have underlying cleft sentences, independent of whether the surface structure is an gaational or a noneguational one. Ic is furthermore argued that emphatic word orders are systematic and predictable given a certain language type, and that the position of the object plays an essential role both in the cleft and noncleft emphatic constructions. (Author) sWorking Papers on Language Universal