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<Paper uid="W06-1505">
  <Title>Sydney, July 2006. c(c)2006 Association for Computational Linguistics A Tree Adjoining Grammar Analysis of the Syntax and Semantics of It-Clefts</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The extant literature on the syntax of it-clefts, as in (1), can be classified into two main approaches.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> First, the cleft pronoun it is an expletive, and the cleft clause bears a direct syntactic or semantic relation to the clefted constituent, such as one of predication (Jesperson, 1937; Chomsky, 1977; Williams, 1980; Delin, 1989; Delahunty, 1982; Rochemont, 1986; Heggie, 1988; 'E. Kiss, 1998).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Second, the cleft clause bears a direct syntactic or semantic relation to the cleft pronoun and is spelled-out after the clefted constituent through extraposition or by forming a discontinuous constituent with the cleft pronoun from the base-generated position at the end of the sentence (Jesperson, 1927; Akmajian, 1970; Emonds, 1976; Gundel, 1977; Wirth, 1978; Percus, 1997; Hedberg, 2000). Under this second approach, the cleft pronoun is not necessarily expletive but rather has a semantic function such as that of a definite article. null  In this paper, we argue for a particular version of the second approach, in which the cleft pronoun and the cleft clause form a discontinuous syntactic constituent, and a semantic unit as a definite description. We propose a syntax of it-clefts using Tree-Local Multi-Component Tree Adjoining Grammar (MCTAG), and a compositional semantics on the proposed syntax using Synchronous Tree Adjoining Grammar (STAG). In section 2, we present arguments against the expletive approach, and in section 3, we provide arguments supporting the discontinuous constituent analysis. We present our TAG analysis in section 4 and extend our proposal to grammatical variations on it-clefts in section 5.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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