The question of form in the forming of questions: The meaning and use of cleftedwh-interrogatives in Swedish

Abstract

This paper addresses the meaning and use of clefted wh-interrogatives (I-clefts) in Swedish. It is shown that I-clefts always relate immediately to the topic under discussion and serve to clarify a matter in relation to this topic. They are never used in out-of-the-blue contexts. I argue that I-clefts have the same information structure as typically assumed for declarative clefts: the clefted clause expresses an existential presupposition and the cleft phrase is the identificational focus of the utterance. I further argue that the implication of existence commonly associated with canonical argument questions is weaker (a conversational implicature) than the existential presupposition associated with clefts. The results from an extensive corpus survey show that argument I-clefts (who, what) constitute no less than 98% of the total number of I-clefts in my material. This frequency is linked to the presuppositional status of the cleft construction: in contexts where the denoted event is presupposed as part of the common ground, the clefted variety is the more effective choice, due to its clear partitioning of focus and ground. The ‘cost’ of using a more complex syntactic structure (the cleft) is thus counterbalanced by the benefit of being able to pose a question adjusted to the contextual requirements. As non-argument questions are typically presuppositional irrespective of syntactic form, the gain of using a cleft is less obvious – hence their infrequency in the material.

Extraction and Pronoun Preposing in Scandinavian

“…(1e) is a relative clause where the relativized item namn 'name' has been extracted from a relative clause which modifies the object of the lexical verb känna 'be acquainted with'. These types of constructions, preposing out of presentational relatives or cleft constructions and preposing or relativization from an embedded relative, were most common in Engdahl's (1997) This is not surprising given that wh-questions in Swedish often are clefted with the clefted constituent preposed, as in (3) (Brandtler 2019).…”

The L2 Acquisition of French Interrogatives: Pragmatic Inferences in Clefted wh-Questions

“…been identified in clefted questions in other languages, notably in Swedish(Brandtler 2019) and Norwegian(Hauge 2018).2 Translation of (5): A: What kind of games did you play for instance? On the playground, as we are in front of the playground and it is recess, what kind of games did you play?…”