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

Cleft and identificational constructions 215
a passage from Twelfth Night in which Sir Andrew Aguecheek overhears Malvolio
who rehearses how he would ask Sir Toby Belch for Olivia’s hand:
(20) Mal: Besides you waste the treasure of your time, with a foolish knight.
And: That’s mee I warrant you.
Mal: One sir Andrew.
And: I knew ’twas I, for many do call mee foole.
(Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, act II, sc. 5; OTA, ll. 1091–95)
To begin with, the identificational that’s mee is technically no IdCC as the that is
not empty, while the ’t- from ’twas I certainly is. However, here the interpretation
as a “truncated it-cleft” only functions with great difficulty. Nothing in the preceding
text lends itself to provide for the omitted relative clause.
Things are obviously different with the following example from Aphra Behn’s
The Lucky Chance where another worried character makes remarks aside:
(21) Sir Feeb: Hum, who’s here? My Gentlewoman – she’s monstrous kind of the
sudden. But whom is’t meant to? [Aside.
Let: Give me your hand, my Love, my Life, my All – Alas! where are you?
Sir Feeb: Hum – no, no, this is not to me – I am jilted, cozen’d, cuckolded, and
so forth. – [Groping, she takes hold of Sir Feeb.
Let: Oh, are you here? indeed you frighted me with your Silence – here,
take these Jewels, and let us haste away.
Sir Feeb: Hum – are you thereabouts, Mistress? was I sent away with a Sham-
Plot for this! – She cannot mean it to me. [Aside.
Let: Will you not speak? – will you not answer me? – do you repent already?
– before Enjoyment are you cold and false?
Sir Feeb: Hum, before Enjoyment – that must be me. Before Injoyment – Ay, ay,
’tis I – I see a little Prolonging a Woman’s Joy, sets an Edge upon her
Appetite. [Merrily.
Let: What means my Dear? shall we not haste away?
Sir Feeb: Haste away! there ’tis again – No – ’tis not me she means: what, at your
Tricks and Intrigues already? – Yes, yes, I am destin’d a Cuckold –
Let: Say, am I not your Wife? can you deny me?
Sir Feeb: Wife! adod, ’tis I she means – ’tis I she means – [Merrily
(Aphra Behn, The Lucky Chance (1687); ChHEDD)
Sir Feeble’s “that must be me” parallels Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s “that’s mee” as that is
referential. Yet, when Sir Feeble turns to “’tis not me she means” and “’tis I she means”
we have a clear object-ClC in the first instance and in the second instance one that
looks like an object ClC but has the pronoun in the matrix clause in subject case. 8
8. Object ClCs with mean in the relative clause (and me in the matrix clause) are very frequent
in our corpus.