Typology of cleft constructions of oral spontaneous speech corpus

Abstract

Cleft constructions are studied under three broad approaches: generative, induced test or reading test and spontaneous speech. The objective of this article is to describe the typology of these constructions based on a spontaneous Brazilian Portuguese speech corpus. The results of this research show that clefting in spontaneous speech differs in some respects from introspective data analysis as well as from the previous descriptions of prosodic typologies induced by reading tests. The findings revealed besides prototypic cleft constructions, inverted, double copula, copula-less and interrogative constructions. It was also found that the pitch accent is not always in the non-presupposed part of these constructions.