Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics

Cleft constructions, such as "It was this man who I have seen", are present in most languages of the world, although they are quite  frequent in Romance languages because of their tendency for having more fixed word-order patterns. They have been the interest of much debate in recent years, due to their unique syntactic and pragmatic characteristics. This presentation focuses on the interaction between these two description levels, by using a corpus-based approach on Brazilian Portuguese TV interviews. Our goal is to understand which rules organize the distribution of six cleft constructions in face-to-face interactions. The first part of the presentation presents a summary of previous papers published on the subject, in which information structure as well as discourse structure seem to interact. The last part of the presentation tries to put forward some pragmatic considerations on the choice between clefts and pseudoclefts, which are syntactically distinguished by means of the type of connector found in the subordinate clause, e.g. "Foi esse homem que/quem eu vi" (sentence translated from the English example above).