The cleft construction: A formal definition
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper addresses the task of systematizing linguistic notions and corresponding terminology: it presents a rigorous definition of the notion of cleft construction. The study is carried out in the theoretical framework of the Meaning-Text approach. The substantive and formal requirements on a rigorous linguistic definition are formulated. The cleft construction in English is described as a basis for the definition: the semantic [SemR], the deep-syntactic [DSyntR] and the surface-syntactic [SSyntR] representations of three English cleft sentences are given, as well as five formal DSyntR ⇔ SSyntR rules for the expression of a focalized Rheme by the cleft construction. The cleft construction is defined as a particular type of linguistic sign; it is a grammatical (surface-syntactic) idiom, headed by a lexeme of the copula verb ‘be’ with fairly complex syntactics. An overview of cleft constructions in several languages structurally different from English-French, Spanish, German, Irish, Kinyarwanda, and Mandarin Chinese-follows. Finally, pseudo-cleft sentences are considered; in contrast to cleft sentences, they are special only from a semantic, but not from a syntactic viewpoint (there is no term * pseudo-cleft construction ): they present a particular organization of the starting meaning. The results of the paper: 1) It proposes a formal notion of cleft construction, which allows the researchers to distinguish-in various languages-syntactic phenomena that serve the same informational purpose (namely, the expression of a focalized Rheme or Theme), but are structurally different; in this way the paper contributes to General syntax. 2) It provides a sketch of a formal description of the cleft construction in English, thus contributing to English studies.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it