Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- 1 Cleft constructions in the Romance and Germanic languages: A contrastive perspective -- 2 Methodology used in the contributions of this volume -- 3 Structure of the book -- 4 Descriptive, theoretical and methodological issues discussed in the present volume -- Acknowledgments -- References -- Part I. Italian Cleft Constructions in a Contrastive Perspective -- Cleft constructions in a contrastive perspective - Towards an operational taxonomy -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Cleft construction: The classic taxonomy -- 2.1 Distinguishing Cleft constructions on the basis of the introducer -- 2.1.1 From English to other languages -- 2.1.2 On the external and internal boundaries of the classic taxonomy of clefts -- 2.2 Distinguishing Cleft constructions on the basis of the cleft clause -- 2.2.1 Nature of the cleft clause introducer and position of the cleft constituent -- 2.2.2 The status of cleft clauses opened by a WH-form -- 2.3 Classifying clefts with no English counterparts -- 2.3.1 Italian implicit Cleft sentences -- 2.3.2 German Cleft sentences with initial cleft constituent -- 2.3.3 French and Spanish Reverse pseudo-cleft sentences -- 3 Cleft constructions: A new taxonomy -- 3.1 A new taxonomy based on the position of the cleft constituent -- 3.1.1 Cleft constructions with initial, medial and final cleft constituent -- 3.1.2 Cleft constructions with initial, medial and final cleft constituent: Cross-linguisticevidence -- 3.1.3 Cleft constructions with initial, medial and final cleft constituent: Paradigm of forms -- 4 Concluding remarks -- References -- Form and frequency of Italian Cleft constructions in a corpus of electronic news - A contrastive perspective with French, Spanish, German and English -- 1 Introduction -- 2 ICOCP Corpus.

2.1 Corpus design -- 2.1.1 Multilingual corpus and corpus size -- 2.1.2 Written texts -- 2.1.3 Electronic texts -- 2.1.4 News items -- 2.1.5 Comparable texts -- 2.2 ICOCP corpus sections and subsections -- 2.3 Corpus query -- 3 Forms of the Cleft constructions in the ICOCP corpus -- 3.1 Cleft constructions with medial cleft constituent -- 3.2 Cleft constructions with final cleft constituent -- 4 Frequency assessment of Cleft constructions and data analysis -- 4.1 Overall frequency of Cleft constructions -- 4.2 Clefts constructions with medial cleft constituent -- 4.3 Cleft constructions with final cleft constituent -- 4.4 Cleft construction in written contemporary Italian: a few sociolinguistic remarks -- 5 Concluding remarks -- 5.1 New insights for language typology -- 5.2 Some open questions -- References -- Cleft sentences. Italian-English in contrast -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Italian and English Cleft sentences from a descriptive point of view -- 3 Information structure and Cleft sentences -- 4 Discourse functions of Italian and English Cleft sentences -- 4.1 Type 1a and Type 1b -- 4.2 Type 2 clefts -- 4.3 Type 3 clefts -- 5 Specific functions within journalistic texts -- 6 Conclusion -- References -- Pseudo-cleft sentences. Italian-French in contrast -- 1 Introduction -- 2 The Pseudo-cleft sentence: The problem with its definition -- 3 Formal types of Pseudo-clefts in our corpus: Quantitative data -- 3.1 Formal types of Pseudo-clefts in Italian -- 3.1.1 Types of introducers -- 3.1.2 Subordinate clauses -- 3.1.3 Formal types of the cleft constituent -- 3.2 Formal types of Pseudo-cleft in French -- 3.2.1 Types of introducers and subordinates -- 3.2.2 The form of the copula -- 3.2.3 The cleft constituent: Formal types -- 3.3 Contrastive observations -- 4 Semantics and information structure of Pseudocleftsentences.

4.1 Semantic pattern of Pseudo-cleft sentences -- 4.2 Information structure of Pseudo-cleft sentences in our corpus -- 5 Textual functions of Pseudo-cleft sentences in our corpus -- 5.1 The position of PC constructions in texts -- 6 Conclusions -- References -- Pseudo-cleft sentences. Italian-Spanish in contrast -- 1 Introduction -- 2 A typology of Pseudo-cleft sentences -- 2.1 Definition of Pseudo-cleft sentences -- 2.2 Specificational function vs. predicative function -- 2.3 Types of Pseudo-cleft sentences -- 3 Quantitative analysis of Pseudo-cleft sentences -- 3.1 Frequency of use of Pseudo-cleft sentences and their subtypes -- 3.2 Formal differences between Pseudo-cleft sentences and their subtypes -- 3.3 A hypothesis on the quantitative differences between Italian and Spanish -- 4 Functions of the cleft constituent in Pseudo-cleft sentences -- 4.1 Ways of recovering the cleft constituent in the subsequent text -- 4.2 Informational and textual functions of Pseudo-cleft sentences -- 5 Conclusions -- References -- Cleft sentences. Italian-Danish in contrast -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Cleft sentences in Danish -- 2.1 A short literature survey -- 2.2 Cleft sentences in Danish: Structural and syntactic features -- 2.2.1 Syntax and subclause connectives -- 2.2.2 Pronominal cleft constituents -- 2.2.3 The matrix verb -- 2.2.4 Other details -- 3 Cleft sentences in Italian (and other languages) -- 3.1 A short literature survey -- 3.2 Cleft sentences in Italian: Structural and syntactic features -- 3.2.1 Explicit and implicit Cleft sentences -- 3.2.2 The matrix verb -- 4 A Cleft sentence typology. General observations -- 5 The Italian and Danish Europarl Cleft sentences in comparison: linguistic material and textual function -- 5.1 The linguistic material of valency and adverbial cleft constituents.

5.2 The textual function of valency and adverbial cleft constituents -- 5.2.1 The ("classic") TYPE 1 Cleft sentence -- 5.2.1.1 Explicit contrast -- 5.2.1.2 Focalizing adverbs -- 5.2.1.3 Combined explicit contrast and focalizer -- 5.2.1.4 Negated cleft constituents -- 5.2.1.5 Repetitions -- 5.2.1.6 The cleft constituent introduces a new entity or concept -- 5.2.1.7 TYPE 1 Cleft sentences. Conclusion and a few statistics -- 5.2.2 The TYPE 2 Cleft sentence -- 5.2.3 The TYPE 3 Cleft sentence -- 5.2.4 The TYPE 4 Cleft sentence -- 6 Cleft sentence occurrences in another corpus of comparable texts -- 7 Conclusion -- References -- Cleft sentences. A translation perspective on Italian and French -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Contrastive linguistics and translation -- 2.1 Differences between an original text and a translated text: Translation universals and "translationese" -- 2.2 Translation corpora and comparable corpora -- 2.3 Translation corpora of newspaper articles: Methodological issues -- 2.3.1 French and Italian newspaper corpora -- 3 Presentation of the corpora compiled for the study of Cleft sentences in French and Italian -- 3.1 Le Monde Diplomatique-Il Manifesto -- 3.2 Press Europ -- 4 Cleft sentences in translation -- 4.1 Monde Diplomatique-Manifesto corpus: Quantitative and qualitative results -- 4.1.1 Distribution of explicit and implicit Cleft sentences -- 4.1.2 Distribution of grammatical categories in Cleft sentences -- 4.1.3 Alternatives to clefts in translation -- 4.2 Press Europ bidirectional corpus: Quantitative and qualitative results -- 4.2.1 Distribution of explicit and implicit Cleft sentences -- 4.2.2 Distribution of grammatical categories in Cleft sentences -- 4.2.3 Alternatives to clefts in translation -- 4.2.4 Comparison between the MD-MAN-corpus and the PE-corpus -- 5 Translation corpora vs. comparable corpora: Concluding remarks.

References -- Part II. Romance and Germanic Cleft Constructions in Contrast -- Frequency, form and function of Cleft constructions in the Swiss SMS corpus -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Distribution and functions of Cleft constructions: State of the art and hypotheses -- 3 Database: The Swiss SMS corpus -- 4 Results -- 4.1 Overall results -- 4.2 Functions of IT-clefts -- 5 Discussion -- 6 Conclusion -- References -- Inferential cleft constructions in translation - French c'est que in political texts -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Forms and functions of inferentials -- 3 Functions of inferential constructions in political texts -- 3.1 The corpus -- 3.2 Inferential c'est que-constructions: Contexts of use -- 3.3 Textual functions of c'est que-constructions -- 3.3.1 Argumentative use in a narrow sense -- 3.3.2 Explicative use -- 4 Inferential clefts in translation -- 5 Conclusion -- References -- Motivating W(H)-Clefts in English and German: A hypothesis-driven parallel corpus study -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Remarks on the structure of W(H)-Clefts -- 3 The standard motivation of W(H)-Clefts -- 3.1 On Givenness and Topic-Comment structure -- 3.2 Linear synchronization of Topic and Comment -- 4 Motivating W(H)-Clefts: Benefits, costs and obstacles -- 4.1 Creating an IP boundary for separate nuclear accents: Phonological separation of Topic and Comment -- 4.2 Structural separation of propositional content and utterance comment -- 4.3 Linear synchronization of constituency and operator scope -- 4.4 Avoiding left-heavy constituent structure -- 4.5 An obstacle to the use of W(H)-Clefts: Horror aequi -- 4.6 The hypotheses tested in this study -- 5 Testing the hypotheses -- 5.1 The phonological separation hypothesis -- 5.2 The utterance comment hypothesis -- 5.3 The scope hypothesis -- 5.4 The structural hypothesis -- 5.5 The horror aequi-hypothesis -- 5.6 Summary.

6 Determining correlations between variables: Multiple Correspondence Analysis.