Enumerative there-clauses and there-clefts: specification and information structure

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article develops a new account of enumerative there-clauses and enumerative there-clefts, which in the literature have tended to be reduced to purely pragmatic, informationally motivated constructions. They have also been treated as separate phenomena: Enumerative there-clauses have been argued to be part of the unitary existential construction, whose main function is to present hearer-new information. Enumerative there-clefts are viewed as focus-marking devices with semantically empty matrix. Against this, we analyse enumerative there-clauses as reduced enumerative there-clefts. We argue that they convey the same representational, or ideational, semantics. They are secondary specification constructions, which assert the existence of Values corresponding to the Variable, which is overtly coded in the cleft construction and implied in the reduced cleft. It is on the textual level that enumerative there-clauses and enumerative there-clefts contrast with each other. On the basis of quantified corpus study of spoken data, we show that the implied Variable is typically textually evoked in the preceding discourse, whereas the overt Variable typically contains new-anchored information.