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

Cleft and identificational constructions 213
point towards the present day register distribution of these forms. Subsequently
we narrowed the scope on the structure of it-ClCs. At this point we need to turn to
the question whether IdCCs and it-ClCs are ‘genetically’ related.
When raising the question at which point pronouns “began to be used as the
focus of an it-cleft”, Ball refers to the medieval history of the IdCC, “for the crucial
syntactic environment is the same: that is, what is essential is the ability of the pronoun
to appear as complement of be” (1991: 276). Lambrecht, who treats ClCs on
a cross-linguistic level, at first sight seems more definite about the issue:
In the case of clefts, the ancestor is the copular subject-predicate construction,
whose available parts are now used by the grammar for a special purpose, that of
focus-marking an argument of another proposition. (2001: 472)
Hence Lambrecht seems to claim the historical precedence of the IdCC.
In their recent Cambridge Grammar of the English Language Huddleston
and Pullum have resumed interpreting IdCCs as it-clefts with an omitted relative
clause; the relative clause can be omitted “if it is recoverable from the prior
context” (2002: 1417). This has been an alluring explanation for many IdCCs as
indeed such a relative clause is easy to recover for a number of examples we looked
into. Thus we have, for instance, found two examples in Shakespeare’s As You Like
It where – at the beginning of a scene – an IdCC serves as answer to a question
which in turn is a ClC:
(16) Jaq: Which is he that killed the Deare?
Lord. Sir, it was I.
(Shakespeare, As You Like It, act IV, sc. 2; OTA, l. 2128f.)
(17) Cel: Are you his brother?
Ros: Was‘t you he rescu’d?
Cel: Was’t you that did so oft contriue to kill him?
Oli: ’Twas I: but ’tis not I: I doe not shame
To tell you what I was, since my conuersion
So sweetly tastes, being the thing I am.
(Shakespeare, As You Like It, act IV, sc. 3; OTA, l. 2287–2290)
The ‘complete ClC’ would then be it was I that killed the Deare and ’twas I (’tis not I)
that did so oft contriue to kill him.
Things are not that obvious when the IdCC is the answer to a question which
itself is not a ClC. Cf. for instance
(18) Bul: What shrill-voic’d Suppliant, makes this eager cry?
Dut: A woman, and thine Aunt great King ’tis I.
Speake with me, pitty me, open the dore, . . .
(Shakespeare, Richard II, act V, sc. 3; OTA, l. 2575–77)