A Syntactic and Pragmatic Study of Cleft Constructions in Persian: An RRG Analysis

In this paper, cleft constructions are examined within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar that links the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the construction. In the other words, on the one hand this paper intends to explain the syntactic properties of the cleft sentences according to this theory of grammar; and on the other hand, it tries to find the relationship between information structure, particularly focus structure and the use of these sentences. The study also tries to figure out the various information reasons for using cleft constructions. Thus, the spoken data are collected from TV, radio and daily conversations and the written ones are obtained from novels and newspapers to be analyzed with respect to the theoretical basis of the project. The findings show that cleft pronoun and the clefted constituent appear as a noun phrase argument and a pragmatic predicate in the constituent projection respectively; and the copular verb shows up as an auxiliary verb, and the cleft clause is peripheral to the matrix core. Moreover, considering the information and focus structure, the cleft sentences have unambiguous focus structures which are stored with their syntactic template in the syntactic inventory. Finally, through a study of the cleft constructions, it is observed that setting emphasis aside, other reasons such as contrast, question-answer and known facts influence clefting.