Rodrigo Gutiérrez-Bravo (El Colegio de México)
Pseudo-clefts in Spanish: A revision
In this talk I propose a terminological revision of the terms "cleft", "pseudo cleft" and “reversed pseudo cleft” traditionally used for Spanish cleft constructions in Hispanic linguistics. Departing form the traditional classification, I propose that Spanish has three different types of cleft sentences: que-clefts (or just clefts) wh-clefts, and pseudo-clefts, which are only those cleft constructions introduced by the locution lo-que. I then address in detail the syntactic and information structure properties of lo-que clefts that justify this specific classification of clefts in Spanish.