Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

Cleft and identificational constructions 207
The most conspicuous observation to be made is already quite unexpected: it
is I/’tis I/’twas I etc. vastly outnumber their counterparts with me: 1,032 tokens
against 104, that is, only 9.15% of all relevant tokens contain an object pronoun. If
we focus on the most frequent construction, namely ’tis I, then the ratio becomes
even more unbalanced: there are 627 tokens of ’tis I and 37 tokens of ’tis me (5.9%
of the overall count for ’tis I/me). The default expression throughout the EModE
period and beyond in plays is ’tis I etc., regardless of the rank, position or provenance
of either the actual speaker in the play or its author. According to Peitsara,
contracted ’tis emerges in speech-based registers in EModE and “holds its ground
until around 1800 as the established form” (2004: 90).
Considering these data, it seems that the 18th-century grammarians who
spent so much time and energy on condemning the alleged burgeoning of it is
me were fighting a rather unnecessary battle, and our initial expectation as to
the development of ClCs and IdCCs is reversed: it is me seems to be too rare
to be considered a suppressed colloquial form that is then gaining ground in
speech-based registers.
Returning to the most frequent relevant construction – ’tis I – we find that
the tokens are almost evenly distributed over the two main categories IdCC and
ClC – in this case, subject ClCs as in (5) below, where the clefted constituent is the
subject of the following relative clause:
(5) But Sir, ’tis I alone am criminal,
And ’twas I,
Justly I thought provok’d him to this hazard.
’Tis I was rude, impatient, insolent,
Did like a mad man animate his anger,
Not like a generous enemy.
(Aphra Behn, The Forc’d Marriage (1671), ChHDD)
Subject ClCs such as these, without an overt relative pronoun to introduce the
second part of the ClC, are also more frequent than subject ClCs with relative
pronouns – and this is not tied to prose vs. verse plays, as one might expect by
looking at the example. The situation is slightly different with ’twas I and the more
conservative, uncontracted form it is I, but the relativizer-less ClCs still make up
a substantial proportion of all subject ClC tokens. Note that this is a syntactic innovation
that is gaining considerable momentum: Ball has stated explicitly that
Late Middle English (LME) “is the period in which the wh-pronouns and the zerocomplementizer
(ø) first appear in the it-cleft” (1991: 295): out of 92 tokens in her
LME corpus for subject ClCs, Ball has 81 instances with that as complementizer
and only five with the zero option.
Turning to ’tis me and related expressions, we do not find a single subject ClC, but
object ClCs instead – in that respect, ’tis me and ’tis I are almost in complementary