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<Paper uid="W06-1505">
  <Title>Sydney, July 2006. c(c)2006 Association for Computational Linguistics A Tree Adjoining Grammar Analysis of the Syntax and Semantics of It-Clefts</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="33" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Arguments against the expletive
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> approach It has been shown in Hedberg (2000) that the cleft pronoun can be replaced with this or that, as in (2), depending on the discourse contextual interpretation of the cleft clause. The fact that the choice of the cleft pronoun is subject to pragmatic constraints indicates that the cleft pronoun cannot simply be an expletive element devoid of any semantic content.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> (2) a. This is not Iowa we're talking about.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> (Hedberg 2000, ex. 17) b. That's the French flag you see flying over there. (Hedberg 2000, ex. 20) Although the details are different, many expletive analyses advocate for the position that the clefted constituent is syntactically associated with the gap in the cleft clause either directly through movement, or indirectly through co-indexation with an operator in the cleft clause. One thing that is common in all these analyses is that the cleft clause is not considered to have the internal structure of a restrictive relative clause. We point out  that the initial element in the cleft clause may be realized either as a wh-word (1) or as that (3a), or it may be absent altogether when the gap is not in the subject position (2, 3b). It may even be in the form of a genitive wh-word as in (3c). The cleft clause is thus a restrictive relative clause.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  (3) a. It was Ohno that won.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> b. It was Ohno Ahn beat.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> c. It was Ohno whose Dad cheered.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6">  The cleft clause, however, does not relate to the clefted constituent in the way that a restrictive relative clause relates to its head noun, as first noted in Jespersen (1927). This is because the clefted constituent can be a proper noun, unlike a head noun modified by a restrictive relative clause, as illustrated in (4). This suggests that there is no syntactic link between the clefted constituent and the gap in the cleft clause.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> (4) * Ohno that won is an American.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="5" start_page="33" end_page="33" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
3 A discontinuous constituent analysis
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> As pointed out in Percus (1997) and Hedberg (2000), it-clefts have existential and exhaustive presuppositions, just as definite descriptions do.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The inference in (5c) associated with (5a) survives in the negative counterpart in (5b). This is exactly the way the presupposition associated with the definite description the king of France behaves: the presupposition spelled-out in (6c) survives in both the affirmative (6a) and the negative counterpart in (6b). Both authors argue that this parallelism between definite descriptions and it-clefts can be accounted for if the cleft pronoun and the cleft clause form a semantic unit, with it playing the role of the definite article and the cleft clause the descriptive component. What this translates to syntactically is that the cleft clause is a restrictive relative clause which is situated at the end of the sentence, forming a discontinuous constituent with the cleft pronoun.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2">  (5) a. It was Ohno who won.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> b. It was not Ohno who won.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> c. Someone won, and only one person won.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> (6) a. The king of France is bald.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> b. The king of France is not bald.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> c. There is one and only one king of  France.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Percus (1997) further points out that it-clefts pattern with copular sentences containing definite description subjects with regard to anaphor binding. In the absence of c-command, an anaphor in the clefted constituent position can be bound by an antecedent inside the cleft clause, as shown in (7a). While we don't yet have an explanation for how this type of binding takes place, we follow Percus in noting that since copular sentences with definite description subjects also exhibit this pattern of binding, as shown in (7b), a uniform explanation for the two cases can be sought if the cleft pronoun and the cleft clause together form a definite description.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> (7) a. It was herself that Mary saw first.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> b. The one that Mary saw first was herself.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> Under the discontinuous constituent analysis, it-clefts reduce to copular sentences, and therefore the observation that they can have equative and predicational interpretations (Ball 1978, DeClerck 1988, Hedberg 2000), the readings attested in copular sentences, follows. For instance, (5a) (repeated as (8a)) can be paraphrased as (8b), and corresponds to a typical equative sentence. And (9a) can be paraphrased as (9b), and corresponds to a typical predicational sentence. According to our analysis, (8a) will be assigned the semantic representation in (8c), and (9a) will be assigned the semantic representation in (9c).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12">  (8) a. It was Ohno who won.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> b. The one who won was Ohno.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="14"> c. THEz [won(z)] [z = Ohnoprime] (9) a. It was a kid who beat John.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="15"> b. The one who beat John was a kid.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="16"> c. THEz [beat(z, Johnprime)] [kid(z)]</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="6" start_page="33" end_page="35" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Our TAG analysis
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Inspired by work of Kroch and Joshi (1987) and Abeill'e (1994) on discontinuous constituents resulting from extraposition, we propose a tree-local MCTAG analysis for the syntax of it-clefts. Crucially, we propose that the elementary trees for cleft pronoun and the cleft clause form a multi-component set, as in {(ait), (bwho won)} in Figure 1 and {(ait), (bwho beat)} in Figure 4.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> for It was Ohno who won For the derivation of equative it-clefts as in (8a), we adopt the copular tree in (awas), a tree similar to the one proposed in Frank (2002) for copular sentences. In this tree, FP is a small clause of the copula from which the two DPs being equated originate. (8a) is derived by substituting (ait) into DP0 in (awas), adjoining (bwho won) into FP in (awas), and substituting (aOhno) into DP1 in (awas). The syntactic derivation tree and the derived tree for (8a) are given in (d8a) in Figure 2 and (g8a) in Figure 3 respectively.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Postulating separate projections for the copula and the small clause can account for the fact that the clefted constituent and the cleft clause seem to form a constituent, as in (10ab) (from Hedberg 2000), and yet they can be separated by an adverbial phrase, as in (10c). In our analysis, (10ab) are possible because the bracketed parts are FPs.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4">  (10c) is possible because an adverbial phrase can adjoin onto FP or Fprime, separating the clefted constituent and the cleft clause.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> (10) a. I said it should have been [Bill who negotiated the new contract], and it should have been.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> b. It must have been [Fred that kissed Mary] but [Bill that left with her].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> c. It was Kim, in my opinion, who won the race.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8">  We propose to do compositional semantics using STAG as defined in Shieber (1994). In STAG, each syntactic elementary tree is paired with one or more semantic tree with links between matching nodes. A synchronous derivation proceeds by mapping a derivation tree from the syntax side to an isomorphic derivation tree in the semantics side, and is synchronized by the links specified in the elementary tree pairs. In the tree pairs given in Figure 1, the trees on the left side are syntactic elementary trees and the ones on the right side are semantic trees. In the semantic trees, F stands for formulas, R for predicates and T for terms. (aprimeit) and (bprimewho won) in the multi-component set in Figure 1 together define semantics of quantification, where the former contributes the argument variable and the latter the restriction and scope, and (aprimewas) represents the semantics of equative sentences. The derivation tree for the semantics of (8a) is given in (dprime8a) in Figure 2, and the seman- null tic derived tree is given in (gprime8a) in Figure 3. Note that the semantic derivation tree in (dprime8a) is isomorphic to the syntactic one in (d8a). The semantic derived tree in (gprime8a) can be reduced to the formula in (11) after the application of l-conversion. (11) THEz [won(z)] [z = Ohnoprime] For the derivation of predicational it-clefts as in (9a), we use the tree pairs in &lt;(awas kid), (aprimewas kid)&gt;, &lt;(aJohn), (aprimeJohn)&gt;, and &lt;{(ait), (bwho beat)}, {(aprimeit), (bprimewho beat)}&gt; in Figure 4. The elementary tree in (awas kid) which represents a predicational copular sentence is similar to the one in (awas) in that in both trees, the copula combines with a small clause FP. The important difference is that in (awas kid) the subject DP is an argument substitution site and the predicative DP (a kid) is lexicalized, whereas in (awas) both the subject and the non-subject DPs are argument substitution sites. This difference is reflected in the semantic trees, as seen in (aprimewas) in Figure 1 with two term nodes and (aprimewas kid) in Figure 4 with one term node. The syntactic and semantic derivation trees, which are isomorphic, are given in &lt;(d9a), (dprime9a)&gt; in Figure 5, and the corresponding derived trees are given in &lt;(g9a), (gprime9a)&gt; in Figure 6. The semantic derived tree in (gprime9a) can be reduced to the formula in (12) after the application of l-conversion.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9">  for It was a kid who beat John</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="7" start_page="35" end_page="38" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Extensions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this section, we extend the proposed syntactic analysis to grammatical variations on it-clefts: wh-extraction of the clefted constituent as in (13), unbounded dependency between the relative pronoun and its gap in the cleft clause as in (14), and coordination of the constituent containing the clefted constituent and the cleft clause as in (15).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  (13) Whoj was it tj who won? (14) It was Ohno whol the judges said tl won.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> (15) It was [Ohno who won] and [Kim who lost].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  For the derivation of (13), the elementary trees in Figure 7 are required in addition to {(ait), (bwho won)} in Figure 1. (awho was) represents the structure with the wh-extraction of the clefted constituent. Substituting (awho) into DP1 and (ait) into DP0, and adjoining (bwho won) onto FP in (awho was), as in the derivation tree in (d13), produces the derived tree in (g13) in Figure 8. For the derivation of (14), the elementary trees in Figure 9 are required in addition to {(ait),  Ohno who the judges said won (bwho won)} in Figure 1. Adjoining (bsaid) onto the Cprime node in (bwho won) has the effect of stretching the dependency between the relative pronoun who and its gap in the cleft clause. The derivation and the derived trees for (14) are given in Figure 10.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> To handle the coordination of the constituent containing the clefted constituent and the cleft clause, as illustrated in (15), we propose to use Node Contraction and Conjoin proposed in Sarkar and Joshi (1996). Informally, Node Contraction takes two nodes of like categories and collapses them into a single node, and Conjoin coordinates the least nodes dominating the two contiguous strings. We use the conjunction tree in Figure 11 to apply Conjoin at FP.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Figure 12 contains the elementary tree anchoring equative was. We mark the nodes to be contracted with a box, and augment the name of the elementary tree with a set listing these contraction nodes. Thus, (awas){DPi,T,Cop} means that DPi, T and Cop nodes are marked for contraction in (awas) elementary tree.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Composition of (awas){DPi,T,Cop} tree in Figure 12 and another (awas){DPi,T,Cop} tree with the conjunction tree in Figure 11, along with the substitution and adjoining of (aOhno) and an equivalent tree (aKim) anchoring Kim, (bwho won) and an equivalent tree (bwho lost) anchoring lost, and (ait) in appropriate places, yields the derived structure in Figure 13, where the contracted nodes get identified. In this structure, the DP hosting it is dominated by two TP nodes, T is dominated by two Tprime nodes and Cop is dominated by two CopP nodes. Thus, the derived structure produced by Conjoin and Node Contraction is a directed graph, not a tree.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7">  who won and Kim who lost The derivation structure for (15) is also a directed graph, as shown in Figure 14. (ait) is dominated by two (awas){DPi,T,Cop} trees, indicating that it is being shared by the two (awas){DPi,T,Cop} trees.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="8" start_page="38" end_page="39" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We have proposed a syntax and semantics of itclefts, using tree-local MCTAG and STAG, and shown that the proposed syntactic analysis is ex- null tendable to handle various grammatical variations on it-clefts such as wh-extraction of the clefted constituent, unbounded dependency between the relative pronoun and its gap in the cleft clause and coordination of the constituent containing the clefted constituent and the cleft clause. In our TAG analysis of it-clefts, the cleft pronoun and the cleft clause bear a direct syntactic relation because the elementary trees for the two parts belong to a single multi-component set. They do not actually form a syntactic constituent in the derived tree, but as the elementary trees for the two belong to the same multi-component set, the intuition that they form a discontinuous constituent is captured.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Further, the semantics of the two trees is defined as a definite quantified phrase, capturing the intuition that they form a semantic unit as a definite description.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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