The cleft construction: A formal definition
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".