Matthew Reeve: Clefts and their relatives

Abstract

The book clefts and their relatives by Matthew Reeve offers a new ac- count of the syntax and semantics of clefts in English and Russian. The book tries to solve a number of puzzles in a uniform way and raises the theoretically important issue of compositionality, which according to the author should be formulated in a non-traditional way. However, the Russian data used in the book are often debatable, so that some of the arguments for the proposed analysis are not convincing.

The book consists of six chapters. In the first chapter the author notes the lack of a thorough analysis of clefts in English and Russian. In the second he proposes a syntactic analysis of English clefts. The third chapter discusses the licensing of relative clauses in English clefts. The fourth offers an analysis of clefts in Russian similar to that proposed for English. In the fifth chapter the syntax of specificational sentences is discussed, and some remaining issues with the syntax of clefts are resolved. Chapter 6 concludes the book.