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

214 Claudia Lange & Ursula Schaefer
Here the ‘omitted’ relative clause could be it is I who make(s) the eager cry. Yet – here’s
the stumbling block: where the surface structure makes it obvious, Shakespeare’s
it-ClCs more often than not show the present tense verb of the relative clause in
‘not-third-person’ inflection. In the previous section we attributed this finding to
the fact that ’tis was a focus marker rather than a clause in its own right. If, as
we suppose, the biclausal structure of the ClC was not yet grammaticalized in
EModE, the question as to how the verb in the ‘relative clause’ would be inflected
would be a moot one to begin with, but which we cannot answer at the moment
from lack of evidence.
Finally, let us look into an example from Shakespeare’s Richard III which does
not provide the ‘omitted’ relative clause in the immediate linguistic context:
(19) King: Who’s there?
Rat.: Ratcliffe, my Lord, ’tis I: the early Village Cock
Hath twice done salutation to the Morne,
(Shakespeare, Richard III, act V, sc. 3; OTA, l. 3671–73)
There is no difficulty in thinking of such a relative clause as it is I who / that is there.
And, as a matter of fact, the pragmatic situation in this example is exactly the one
in which we find today IdCCs of the kind it is I/it is me – and so is the one from
ex. (18). While in the latter a door separates the two characters, no such obstacle
separates the king from Ratcliffe. 7 However, when Ratcliffe enters Richard’s tent on
Bosworth Field the king has just been musing about “tomorrow’s vengeance on the
head of Richard”, and might have difficulties in reorienting.
Now, when does one use the IdCC it is I/me today? A likely context is, for
instance, the beginning of a telephone call. When Jill Smith calls somebody she
knows scarcely or not at all, she will usually identify herself as “Hello, this is Jill
Smith (calling)”, while in other instances a simple “Hi, it’s me” would probably do,
provided that Jill can count on the fact that the person answering the phone could
easily recognize her voice.
In terms of the concept of ‘truncated it-clefts’ as suggested by Huddleston and
Pullum (2002: 1417) one could interpret the telephone it’s I/me as the answer to an
inferred question of the sort “Who may be calling?” asked – usually in thought, we
would suppose – by the person whose number Jill has dialled, when first hearing
the phone ringing. The more old-fashioned identification “Hello, this is Jill Smith
calling” would then witness to (a) answering an inferred question and (b) some
kind of abridged version of the ClC “It/This is Jill Smith who is calling”.
In our plays we find a somewhat reverse situation where eavesdropping
characters speak to themselves – or, for that matter, in asides. Our first example is
7. Cf. Hatcher (1948: 1085f.) for similar remarks.