Cleft sentences with narrow focus in Chinese and Italian: A preliminary comparative study

This paper compares Chinese shì...de proper clefts (PC) and Italian standard prototypical cleft sentences (IC), i.e., cleft sentences with narrow focus on a single constituent in Chinese and Italian. The study reveals that while syntactic differences are notable, pragmatic contexts of use are similar in both languages. Syntactically, both PCs and ICs share a biclausal structure with a main clause and a cleft subclause. These clefts appear in three main types: subject-focus clefts, adjunct-focus clefts, and object-focus clefts. However, differences arise between the two languages. The most striking difference between PCs and ICs is that the event described in the presupposition of PCs is completed and has reached its endpoint exclusively in the past, whereas this restriction does not apply to ICs. From a pragmatic perspective, the paper shows that both types of clefts can have contrastive and non-contrastive uses.