(Un)headed Relative Clauses Associated with BE: Clefts or Non-Clefts?

Résumé En

This presentation deals with English non-prototypical clefts. It tries to establish criteria to distinguish between pseudo-clefts and structures that are syntactically similar: WH- clauses followed by BE (which may correspond to pseudo-clefts: "Information is what I need") and headed relative clauses with a vague antecedent followed or preceded by BE ("the thing I need is information" or "Information is the thing I need"). The three structures are often analysed as clefts. Drawing on a corpus of naturally occurring data, we show that they are not necessarily clefts and examine a set of features which might help to distinguish between the two. The notions of identification, presupposition and referentiality as well as prosody are shown to work differently according to whether the structure is a cleft or not. Clauses of the kind "The thing I need is information" and "What I need is is information" qualify as clefts more readily than structures of the kind "Information is the thing I need".