Establishing a pseudo-cleft construction in Japanes:: A perspective from everyday conversation

• Autores: Tsuyoshi Ono, Ryoko Suzuki
• Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 284, 2023, págs. 1-15
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • It has been well established that Japanese has one type of cleft construction. This understanding was reached mostly through the examination of single Japanese sentences, constructed based on (pseudo-)cleft examples in English. We identify another type of cleft in Japanese based on the examination of everyday conversation data. This construction can be aptly considered a pseudo-cleft as it involves the interrogative pronoun nani ‘what’. Both structurally and functionally, it behaves similarly to pseudo-clefts in several other languages and to the Japanese traditional cleft, as characterized in recent conversation-based studies.