Aspect-Switching and Subordination: the Role of It-Clefts in Discourse

What it is about

Prince (1978) observed that it-clefts often subordinate the clefted material, as background or as a cause, and mark it as "known fact" (the speaker is not responsible for it). The paper proposes one explanation for three observations: the subordination, the known-fact effect, and the contrast function of it-clefts. The proposal is that an it-cleft is stative: the copula in the head makes the clause denote a state, which overlaps the current reference time and does not move it on. The event that started the state is implicit or was given earlier, so the speaker does not introduce it and is not responsible for it. This is set in a DRT account of temporal structure (Reichenbach's reference times), and it predicts that de-clefting a stative sentence into an event sentence is what makes the discourse sound like a new event was added ("temporal regression"). The examples are from the Survey of English Usage, the LOB corpus and collected data; the paper gives examples and no counts, and it says that the prediction for de-clefting into a perfect state is not yet tested.

Ideas

• I1. Stative marking in the event timeline of world: a sentence headed by a cleft is stored as a state that overlaps the current reference point and does not advance it. Check on the paper's pair (2) and (3), where the clefted version keeps the order of events and the de-clefted version puts the authorisation after the cancellation of leave.
• I2. Measure the subordination with a counter. Build a test of (1) and (2)-(3) style texts from the school courses (world/src/story.rs) and compare the event order produced with and without the cleft. A rule that does not treat clefts as states must fail the order check.
• I3. A discourse-contrast check for de-clefting: when a cleft contrasts with an earlier element, de-clefting should break the contrast link unless the earlier element and the predicate can be matched. Implement the match as a predicate-overlap test over the frames of the two clauses, and test it on the paper's pairs (12) and (16), and (14) and (15).
• I4. Negative control for the known-fact feature: the attribution of responsibility should follow the clefted proposition only. A question "are you sure?" answered after a cleft must not be given the speaker's own commitment unless the cleft is marked as attributed in the frame.

For Mova

The chapters are 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure (clefts and information structure), 36. Discourse relations and coherence (subordination, contrast, coherence) and 37. Register and variation (narrative register, where Prince's examples come from). The code is world/src/story.rs and world/src/events.rs for the timeline and the reference point, world/src/narr.rs for narrative order, and prag/src/frames.rs for the state and event frames. The measures are the event-order check on the paper's pairs (with the de-clefted version as a control) and the contrast-link check, run twice to confirm it is identical.

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/992066.992113

@inproceedings{delin1992aspect,
  title = {{Aspect-Switching and Subordination: the Role of It-Clefts in Discourse}},
  author = {Delin, Judy and Oberlander, Jon},
  booktitle = {COLING 1992 Volume 1: The 14th International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1992},
  doi = {10.3115/992066.992113},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/992066.992113}
}

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