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

Cleft and identificational constructions 217
“your [i.e., Sir Feeble’s] wife” is he convinced that he has been meant throughout.
Hence the culmination in “ ’tis I she means – ’tis I she means”. We therefore suggest
interpreting ’tis I in these two instances as IdCCs, though superficially it takes part
in an object ClC which would demand the object pronoun in predicate position. 10
It might be objected that while before we tried to make up ‘omitted’ relative
clauses in order to interpret IdCCs as “truncated it-clefts”, here we are doing the reverse,
by denying that the verb in the overt relative clause assigns case to the predicate
pronoun. Yet, before we try to substantiate our analysis we should come back to the
example from Twelfth Night (ex. 20). Remember that when Sir Andrew Aguecheek
first expresses the suspicion that Malvolio might be speaking about him, he does so
by saying “That’s me, I warrant you”. Immediately after that Malvolio specifies his
reference to “a foolish knight” by “One sir Andrew”. Again: the character gains certainty
that the person referred to previously is actually identical with him.
Hatcher’s very illuminating article (dating back almost 60 years (1948)) in
which she treats the development from ce suis je to c’est moi might help to explain
the switches to the identificational ’tis I in the two scenes we have just looked into.
In view of the development in French, Hatcher observes that ce est il (‘this is he’)
has a “truly climactic effect” when it is used to express this insight that “ ‘the person
present and the person just named are one and the same’ ” (1948: 1081). Unfortunately
Hatcher does not discuss the same ‘climactic effect’ for the first person. Yet
this is exactly what the two scenes from Shakespeare and Aphra Behn are all about.
For Sir Andrew Aguecheek this “fusion of two potentially independent identities”
(1948: 1081) is facilitated as his name is explicitly mentioned. Sir Feeble, in his
turn, has to take a more complicated way of bringing about this fusion thanks to
his wife’s semi-rhetorical question: “am I not your Wife?”.
Now, does all this get us any closer to answering the question as to how IdCCs
and it-ClC are correlated? And, what is more, if we find an answer beyond the
sheer surface observation that the two are made up of the same building blocks,
would this help us better to understand the rise of object case pronouns in predicate
position? Let us see where we have got so far.
From the examples we have discussed in this chapter it should have become obvious
that the suggestion to interpret some (if not all) independent copular clauses as
‘truncated it-clefts’ (Huddleston and Pullum 2002) is only moderately helpful. Though
the retrieval of the ‘omitted’ relative clause was relatively unproblematic in our exs.
(16) to (19), the putatively ‘omitted’ relative clause for ex. (19) was reconstructed in a
10. The difference between this example and ex. 14 (“No, no, Sir, I am the Thorn that galls
him; ’tis me, ’tis me he hates”) is that in Behn the ’tis I in the repeated “ ’tis I she means” expresses
a sudden insight on the speaker’s side, while in ex. (14) the repeated ’tis me corrects a
mistake on the addressee’s side.