TY - JOUR
T1 - Establishing a pseudo-cleft construction in Japanese
T2 - A perspective from everyday conversation
AU - Ono, Tsuyoshi
AU - Suzuki, Ryoko
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank Shoichi Iwasaki, Michiko Kaneyasu, Hongyin Tao, Maggie Camp, Ruth Fallon, and the editors of the special issue for their timely help with the preparation of this article. We would also like to thank anonymous reviewers for their close and constructive reading of the article. Finally, we would like to thank Hanae Koiso at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics for allowing us to use the monitor version of the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation for the current project. This study has been supported by the Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Fellowship and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research 17KT0061), awarded to Ono and Suzuki respectively.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2023/3
Y1 - 2023/3
N2 - It has been well established that Japanese has one type of cleft construction. This understanding was reached mostly through the examination of single Japanese sentences, constructed based on (pseudo-)cleft examples in English. We identify another type of cleft in Japanese based on the examination of everyday conversation data. This construction can be aptly considered a pseudo-cleft as it involves the interrogative pronoun nani ‘what’. Both structurally and functionally, it behaves similarly to pseudo-clefts in several other languages and to the Japanese traditional cleft, as characterized in recent conversation-based studies.
AB - It has been well established that Japanese has one type of cleft construction. This understanding was reached mostly through the examination of single Japanese sentences, constructed based on (pseudo-)cleft examples in English. We identify another type of cleft in Japanese based on the examination of everyday conversation data. This construction can be aptly considered a pseudo-cleft as it involves the interrogative pronoun nani ‘what’. Both structurally and functionally, it behaves similarly to pseudo-clefts in several other languages and to the Japanese traditional cleft, as characterized in recent conversation-based studies.
KW - Conversation
KW - Japanese
KW - Pseudo-cleft
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85146476600&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85146476600&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.lingua.2022.103437
DO - 10.1016/j.lingua.2022.103437
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85146476600
SN - 0024-3841
VL - 284
JO - Lingua
JF - Lingua
M1 - 103437
ER -