Assessing the emergence of reduced clefts in Brazilian Portuguese: rhetoric structure, information structure and syntax

Abstract

This paper assesses the issue of the emergence of reduced clefts in Brazilian Portuguese, from an analysis of the contexts in which this construction takes place. To do so, it develops a reasoning based on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), by means of a comparison of its textual usage vis-à-vis the one of canonical and inverted clefts, on a corpus of TV interviews. These two latter types present distinct usage contexts in terms or Rhetorical Relations, which are taken to reflect the informational distinction between stressed-focus it-clefts and informative-presupposition it-clefts. Reduced clefts were found exactly in the same contexts of canonical clefts, which allows one to conclude that these ones conform the structure from which the innovative construction was generated. This is compatible with the possibility of reduced clefts being the result of a grammaticalization process, to be explored in greater detail in future work.