Pseudo-Grice on Pseudo-Cleft

---- By J. L. Speranza
------- for the Grice Club.

---- THIS IS A FIRST PART OF A STUDY in progress, "Pseudo-Grice on pseudo-cleft; or How I spent Halloween". This first part covers the real important topic, i.e. Grice and clefts.

"cleft" is a very old English word: O.E. geclyft (adj.) "split, cloven," spelling infl. by cleft, new weak pp. of cleave (1), from P.Gmc. *kluftis. It has been abused by authors who speak of 'cleftability' in English (as opposed, say, Japanese). We need not go there.

A "cleft sentence", as first used by someone (or other) -- I would submit Otto Jesperson (Grice's favourite linguist, sic mispelled in the transcript of PGRICE) -- is a complex sentence (i.e. having a main clause and a dependent clause), and I rely basicall on wiki here, "which has a meaning that could be expressed by a simple sentence."

"Clefts", the wiki entry goes, "typically put a particular constituent into focus. This focusing is often accompanied by a special intonation. In English, a cleft sentence can be constructed along various lines."

a)
"it" + Conjugated Form of TO BE + X + subordinate clause.

-- where "it" is the cleft pronoun par excellence, and X is usually a Noun Phrase (although it can also be a prepositional phrase, and in some cases an adjectival or adverbial phrase)."

"The focus is obviously NOT on "it", but either on X, or else on the subordinate clause (or element thereof)".

Examples:

(1) It is Grice whom we are citing.
(2) It's implicature that I love.
(3) It was from Strawson that Grice heard about the truth-value gap.
(4) It was meeting Austin that really started Grice off on linguistic botanising.

"English is very rich in cleft constructions."

The survey can proceed in some more detail as follows:

"It"-clefts, proper:

(5) It is Grice to whom we refer.

But then there's the pseudo-cleft, or "Wh"-cleft:

(6) What Grice wanted to write was a book.

Then there's the 'reversed' wh-cleft, or 'Pseudo-cleft' proper-proper:

(7) A book is what Grice wanted to write.

Then there's the "All"-cleft:

(8) All you need is Loeb.

There's the "inferential" cleft:

(9) It is not that Jack loves Jill. It's just that he has a way with her that is different.

Then there's the "There"-cleft:

(10) And then there's a book he wanted to write.

There's the "If"/"because" cleft:

(11) If Grice wanted to be a philospher it's because he wanted to travel to Athens.

There's the "Demonstrative" cleft:

(12) That's what he wanted to do.

---- What does "it" mean (Griceanly)?

"The role of the cleft pronoun ("it" in the case of English) is controversial."

"Some say "it" doesn't mean anything".

---- Applying Frege's sense and reference.

Regarding the 'sense' of 'it', it's possibly senseless.

Regarding the 'reference' or denotatum:

"There is controversy on this. Some, like Otto "Jesperon", believe "it" to be referential. This has been refuted by people like Grice who, on occasion, have treated "it" as a 'dummy'" (WoW:v).

"Jesperson's (sic) analysis has come to be termed "expletive"; Grice's is referred to as the "extrapositional" approach" -- or 'extrapolational' approach": you extrapolate a philosopher from the chair of metaphysics to the chair of applied English grammar -- for non-native speakers!

"Some neo-Griceans -- not Grice -- propose a hybrid approach: it's called the "having your cake-and-eat-it approach", which combining ideas from both Jespersen's and Grice's takes on the status of "it". Neo-Griceans, in their manifesto, "How to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds", have shown that "it" can have a range of scopes -- from semantically void to full reference, depending on the mood of the 'utterer'".

"Similarly controversial is the status of the subordinate clause -- what follows 'it' -- often termed the "cleft-clause", or 'what-follows-'it'".

"While most neo-Griceans, and some post-Griceans would agree that the cleft clause in wh-clefts can be analysed as some kind of relative clause (free or fused or headless -- depending on the treatment it received), there is a slight disagreement as to the exact nature of the relative clause: 'what-follows-'it'".

"Traditionally, in Jesperson, the wh-word in a cleft like

(13) What you need is an implicature.

pertaining to the relative "what you need" is understood to be the first constituent of the relative clause, and function as its head.

"An alternative analysis can be posited."

"Utterers were asked what they meant by 'it', and the sample of replies were collected and statistically evaluated. This second theory focuses on what utterers _think_ they mean when they say "it".

"Utterers, from what can be inferred from the samples, take the relative clause as headed (rather than 'headless' -- but cfr. the dialect of Cumbria), with wh-word being located outside the clause proper and functioning as its 'head', as it were."

The analysis also yields different results if the explication is left to teenagers. Consider:

(14) It was because Tom was ill we decided to abandon him.

(15) It was in Spring Break that Tom first found out about it.

(16) It was with great reluctance that Vicky accepted the invitation.

A further difficulty with 'teen' speak, is that, in our bi-partitional analysis of the pseudo-cleft, it was found that, in teen speak, the second part may, in fact, turn up to be just about anything (you can imagine). Consider:

Prepositional phrase:

(17) It was by foot that Peter walked.

Adverbial Phrase:

(18) It was grossly that Homer (Simpson) burped.

Non-finite clause:

(19) It is to address a far-reaching problem that Vicky is setting out to do.

Gerund:

(20) It could be going home early or slacking off school that Cherie reacted to.

Adverbial clause:

(21) It was because Pat was so lonely all the time that drove her to move out (from where she was).

In more adult speech, it has been found that pseudo-clefts can be "equative" (Halliday 1976), "stative" (Delin and Oberlander 1995) or "variable-value paired", according, obviously, to context.

"The major area of interest with regard to pseudo-cleft constructions has been for the Gricean their complete lack of information structure."

"A cleft never introduces NEW information. We all know what "it" means.

Therefore, what a cleft does is repeat already GIVEN information ("It's me! It's me!" she cried with her totally identifiable voice).

Plus, the pseudo-cleft trades, obscenely, on INFERRABLE information, i.e. that unimportant pieces of information that the Utterer will trust his Addressee (if not autist, or something -- 'momentary lapse of attention scan') to be able to infer (but NOT 'imply') from the previous conversation (if there was any).

"The reason why information structure plays such a redundant role in the area of clefts is largely due to the fact that people don't care. "We have become," said Elizabeth Taylor, in a recent interview, "a careless lot, linguistically speaking."

In this context, the clefts as used by schizophrenics (vide Roger Brown, Grice in the asylum) will serve. While it may be reasonable to assume that the variable of a cleft (that is, the material encoded by the cleft clause) may be typically, i.e. standardly GIVEN and its value (expressed by the cleft constituent) is NEW, it is not always so -- and nurses find 'it' hard to decide -- when is when."

"Sometimes, in conversations we have held and recorded with schizophrenics -- not the violent types -- neither element contains new information, but then it doesn't contain new information, either. You'll hear them say things like

(22) That is what I think.

and a long pause follows -- and this is the physician, mind. Sometimes it is the cleft clause which contains the NEW part of the message, as in Vicky Torres, who said,

(23) And that's when I got sick.

-- even when nobody was asking her (for we knew and we didn't really care). What's worse, in some constructions, it is the simple mathematical equation between cleft clause and cleft constituent which brings about the allegedly newsworthy information which turns out to be vacuous, as in:

(24) Whatever.

In any case, the French also use 'clefts', -- 'c'est' --, as in

(25) C'est Brigitte Bardot que je cherche.

or

(26) C'est Paris que est 'gay'.

-- Due to the French influence (via Strassbourg), clefts are now becoming more spoken in Germany (Deutschland) as in:

(27) Das ist genau was ich dachte

or

(28) Italien ist nicht wohin ich gehen wollte.

-- but "it" is not found in Italian -- or Italian opera, at least (that we think)."