“It is while SleepIng that I can clearly see”: An Approach to Cleft Sentences in Catalan

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to provide an approach to cleft and pseudocleft sentences in Catalan. These structures are present not only in Romance and Germanic languages (where they have received special attention by linguists) but also in several world languages that are typologically very different; however, they always present formal and functional properties which largely overlap. Despite the productivity of clefts and pseudoclefts in Catalan, we have no comprehensive case study that gives an account of their pragmatic, semantic, syntactic or prosodic properties; we only have occasional references (which may be more or less extensive) in papers which cover other areas of study and, therefore, have other goals. For this reason, the article I present aims to be a first approach to these structures. Firstly, I briefly describe the pragmatic and semantic properties of clefts and pseudoclefts, as well as their main syntactic features. Next, I present my proposal of designation and classification, defending the need to differentiate clearly between clefts on the one hand and pseudoclefts on the other. Finally, I outline a proposal of theoretical analysis.