| dc.description.abstracteng | This dissertation addresses the interpretation of it-clefts in German, as well as that
of the related focus structure of Hungarian pre-verbal focus, and presents novel
answers to several research gaps. It-clefts are sentences of the form It was Sue who
climbed a mountain. One of the most debated questions is whether or not this
sentence structure comes with an exhaustivity inference of the form Nobody other
than Sue climbed a mountain, and, if it does, whether the exhaustivity is part of the
semantic structure of the it-cleft, or a pragmatic inference. This thesis presents the
results of a corpus study for German which, in addition to experiments designed
based on the naturally occurring corpus data, show that German it-clefts can be
exhaustive, but they are not exhaustive in every case. Whether or not it-clefts
receive an exhaustive reading depends largely on the context. This assumption
is confirmed by a production study, which suggests that, when producing it-clefts
in semi-spontaneous written dialog-situations, speakers prefer it-clefts in contexts
that are exhaustive and/or contrastive. In acceptability ratings, speakers do not
reject it-clefts in non-exhaustive environments. It seems that it-clefts are likely
to be used and interpreted to express some kind of exhaustivity. However, the
data do not support a semantic analysis of this exhaustivity inference. It-clefts
are not a unified class of sentences. There are (at least) two different kinds of itclefts, namely Focus-Background and Topic-Comment Clefts, which serve different
information structural purposes and differ in terms of their exhaustivity. This
thesis presents experimental results for German which show that the two cleft types
actually vary slightly regarding their exhaustivity judgments: TC-clefts seem to be
a little less frequently exhaustive than FB-clefts. This thesis further shows that,
contrary to previous theoretical assumptions, it-clefts are combinable with a large
variety of focus particles, both exclusive (only) and non-exclusive (e.g. also), which
can have an influence on the exhaustivity of the cleft structure. As for the case
of Hungarian pre-verbal focus, this dissertation shows that this sentence structure
did not show the strong exhaustivity that is frequently attributed to it. Therefore,
the data support the more recent presuppositional analysis of the exhaustivity
inference of Hungarian pre-verbal focus. | de |