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

Cleft and identificational constructions 209
were calques of the French tonic forms of the pronouns. This is ruled out for the
simple reason that the object pronouns in subject complement position creep in at
a time when the direct language contact between English and French was long over
(cf. Ball 1991: 280 & Visser 1963: 244), and it would be highly unlikely to assume that
parodies of French on stage could have a bearing on the English pronoun system.
Generally, in all the me-variants under consideration (except where negation
is involved), object ClCs outnumber IdCCs, for example:
(9) For him you tremble, and ’tis me you fear.
(Abel Boyer, Achilles (1700); ChHEDD)
Now, explaining me in object ClCs is not a difficult task: the object pronoun me is
topicalized to clause-initial position for emphasis:
(10) [‘tis] mei you fear __i The majority of it is me-tokens in the database is then accounted for: they occur
in object ClCs and are therefore determined by the syntactic context. Unlike PDE,
where pronoun variation in ClCs is a matter of style (formal vs. informal), the
decisive factor in EModE is the syntactic context alone (subject vs. object ClC).
With the further development of the ClC, it is I came to be used in formal styles
for object ClCs as well.
We will return to identificational it is me below. The next section will be concerned
with some general observations on the structure of the ClCs in our data.
2. The structure of EModE pronoun-focus it-ClCs
As said above, the prescriptive excitement over it is I/me is not matched by a
similar abundance of studies tracing the origin of the construction, and neither
has the recent interest in focus, information structure and ClCs (cf. Smits 1989,
Lambrecht 1994, 2001; Bosch & van der Sandt 1999; Kiss 1999, Rebushi & Tuller
1999) been extended to the development of ClCs in the history of English. Our
data seem to suggest that, at least in the speech-based register ‘plays’ up to 1800,
the structure of the ClC has yet to emerge.
The defining property of ClCs is that they “express a simple proposition via
biclausal syntax”, as Lambrecht (2001: 466) put it. More precisely,
A CLEFT CONSTRUCTION (CC) is a complex sentence structure consisting
of a matrix clause headed by a copula and a relative or relative-like clause whose
relativized argument is coindexed with the predicative argument of the copula.
Taken together, the matrix and the relative express a logically simple proposition,
which can also be expressed in the form of a single clause without a change in
truth conditions. (Lambrecht 2001: 467)