Specificational it- and there-clefts with quantified NPs as value: semantics and pragmatics

Specificational it- and there-clefts with quantified NPs as value: semantics and pragmatics Ngum Meyuhnsi Njende There is no doubt in the literature that examples like (1) are it-clefts. However, little attention has gone to specificational it-clefts with quantified NP as value, despite the fact that the implicature of exhaustiveness attributed to positive it-clefts does not necessarily apply to them, as shown by (1). By contrast, examples like (2) are not, despite their parallel grammatical and information structure, viewed as clefts in the general literature. Huddleston (1971:325) offered a number of observations that “argue strongly” for regarding an example like (2) as “a subvariety of the cleft-sentence construction”, but retracted this reasoning in later work. Quirk et al (1985:1406-7) observe that sentences like (2) “resemble” it-clefts in their “rhetorical motivation” and “structural features”. (1) He… can inform you as to the decrease... in the number of airlines out here. "It's at least three that are not here (www.abc3340.com/story/.../tia-leasing-land-for-development) (2) (2) Does anyone know why all of the water fountains are turned off, there's at least three that do not work (www.yelp.com/.../desc=three+sisters+falls&find_loc=Dallas%2C+TX) Davidse (2000, & Kimps 2016) assume a minority position in arguing that (2) is a true cleft construction, which has to be distinguished from an existential clause with quantified NP containing a NP-internal restrictive relative clause (RRC) like (3). In (3) the RRC builds together with its antecedent, the head places, a complex type designation (‘places not visited by me’), which is quantified by more. (3) There are more places I haven’t been than there are places I have been. This paper focuses on the neglected quantifying it-and there-clefts, setting out to (1) examine the distribution of quantifiers, and quantity modifiers, in their value NPs, (2) link this to their different pragmatic inferences, (3)and assess the case for their parallel grammatical and information structure. The first aim will be realized by carrying out a qualitative and quantitative corpus study of exhaustive extractions of specificational it- and there-clefts with quantified NPs from the Wordbanks online corpus. The classification of the data will focus on the question whether the quantifiers are absolute, i.e. specify the “size'' of the designated set or mass, by directly measuring it against a cardinal or non-specific scale, or relative, i.e. ``make a quantitative assessment relative to a reference mass” (Langacker 1991: 82-3). The hypotheses against which the results will be interpreted include claims in the literature that universal relative quantifiers are impossible in it-clefts (Bara 2006) and that relative quantifiers as such are impossible in there-clefts (cf. Milsark 1977). These findings will then feed into the second aim, reconsideration of the view that specificational it-clefts have a conversational implicature of exhaustiveness attached to them (Horn 1981), and there-clefts not. Finally, the precise functional meanings coded by the external and internal structural relations of the value NP with quantifier will be discussed with a view to clarifying the controversial status of quantifying there-clefts relative to the non-controversial one of quantifying it-clefts in the literature. References Bara, G. 2005. Comparison between it-clefts and wh-clefts: Similarities and differences. Seminar Paper English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics (ells.ccsenet.org) Declerck, R. 1988. Studies on copular sentences, clefts and pseudo-clefts. Leuven/Dordrecht: Leuven University Press/Foris Horn, L. 1981. Exhaustiveness and the semantics of clefts. NELS 11: 125-142.status: publishe