Sebastian Sulger: Irish clefting and information-structure

This paper presents an analysis of Irish clefting couched within LexicalFunctional Grammar. In Irish, cleft sentences are formed using two syntactic permutations. First, a copula is introduced, taking the clefted phrase or word as a predicate. Second, a relative clause is formed containing the remaining material of the original sentence. This basic pattern is valid across a variety of languages. I present different approaches towards copula predication taken within Lexical-Functional Grammar and discuss my analysis of Irish copula constructions. Based on the insights from simple copula predication, I derive my analysis for Irish clefting, claiming that in principle, a parallel syntactic approach for both simple copula clauses and clefting can be assumed. The syntactic analysis of copula clefting has been implemented in a computational LFG grammar using the XLE software. Next, pragmatic aspects of clefting are discussed. Cleft sentences are not only interesting from a syntactic point of view, but also are used to separate new information from old information. In the modular architecture of Lexical-Functional Grammar, additional levels of representation may be added to allow for extra-syntactic analysis. I use the projection of i(nformation)-structure to map strings in the sentence to discourse functions. Applying this type of analysis to clefting, I arrive at a more complete picture of the form and function of Irish clefts.