This book proposes a radically new account of clefts in English, which also has significant crosslinguistic relevance. Research has engaged modern linguistics since the 1960s, and has in its essence been static, with formal and functional linguists viewing them in similar ways. Clefts are generally restricted to constructions with an identifying matrix (-clefts), which are claimed to code information structural meaning only in a non-compositional way. They are assumed to unpack a simple proposition into a focus – presupposition structure. In this book, the authors reject these theoretical-descriptive assumptions, arguing instead that clefts form a field comprising -clefts, -clefts and opaque-verb clefts (with verbs like have, find, know, see etc.). They show that, like any other construction, clefts have propositional semantics which are largely compositionally coded, and fundamentally challenge the existing approach by entering the debate with an in-depth account of specificational and presentational -clefts. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Theoretical and Formal Linguistics, Cognitive and Corpus Linguistics, Empirical Linguistics and Grammar.weiterlesen