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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 25, No. 0, pp.390-414
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2025
Received 10 Feb 2025 Revised 08 Mar 2025 Accepted 17 Mar 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.25..202503.390

Inverted Specificational Pseudoclefts as Last Resort for Specificational Afterthoughts

Okgi Kim
Academic Research Professor, Institute for the Study of Language and Information Kyung Hee University 26, Kyungheedae-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, Korea, Tel: 02) 961-0211 okgikim@khu.ac.kr


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This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Like languages like German and Dutch (Ott and de Vries 2016), English employs so-called specificational afterthoughts (SAs) (e.g., John met someone: Mary), where the appendix (i.e., Mary) appears at the right periphery of the host clause (i.e., John met someone) and is in a cataphoric relation with the correlate (i.e., someone). Under a bi-clausal approach, I assume two different underlying structures for the appendix: one that is syntactically parallel to the host clause (SPC) and the other that is an inverted specificational pseudocleft. Adopting van Craenenbroeck’s (2010) Last Resort logic for sluicing, I propose that English SAs are derived from SPCs as the first option and from inverted specificational pseudoclefts as a Last Resort option when the corresponding SPC is independently unavailable. In the analysis of English SAs, I provide a movement-and-deletion approach, according to which the construction is derived by focus movement and PF-deletion regardless of which of the two possible underlying structures for the appendix is involved.

Keywords:

specificational afterthoughts, inverted pseudoclefts, invisible last resort, focus movement

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 94th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), held on January 2-5, 2020. I thank the audience and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms and suggestions.

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