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

218 Claudia Lange & Ursula Schaefer
way that also could provide for the somewhat ‘unnatural’ situation of the beginning
of a telephone call. Finally, in ex. (20) any ‘omitted’ relative clause that we might make
up to complement the IdCC would be sheer speculation as there is no lexical – not to
speak of syntactical – support whatsoever in the linguistic context. Ex. (21), in turn,
has, for one thing, both an isolated IdCC and what looks like two object ClCs, one
with the object pronoun predicate (as we would expect), and one with the subject
pronoun predicate. As has just been indicated: Sir Feeble and Sir Andrew cognitively
move, as it were, from being the ‘object’ of reference (albeit in focus) of the person
overheard to the ‘subject(-complement)’ position where the identification prevails.
We have, of course, grouped our examples in the present section in such a way
that the ‘omitted’ relative clause becomes increasingly harder to retrieve. At the one
end of the scale we have this ‘omitted’ relative clause spelled out in the utterance immediately
preceding the IdCC (ex. 16 and 17), at the other end we have a completely
‘isolated’ it is I. The latter “identifies out of nothingness”, as Hatcher has it (1948:
1084). In view of this it seems increasingly hard to abide by the claim of Huddleston
and Pullum (2002: 1417) that IdCCs are in fact ‘truncated it-clefts’. We would rather
suggest that in specific situations with specific (linguistic) contexts IdCCs may be extended
into it-ClCs, while in others this is impossible. In historical terms this could
translate into postulating that the IdCC was anterior to and then coexistent with
the it-ClC. If there is – from some point which still needs to be specified – indeed
a ‘routinized‘ form of self-identification with the formula ’tis I which then may be
extended into an it-ClC, we see ‘Emergent Grammar’ at work, in which
[. . .] forms of language are [. . .] embedded in formulaic constructions that are
basically prefabricated but repeated with local variations in a way that Bolinger
called “syntactic diffusion,” one variation splitting off and founding a new familiy
of constructions. (Hopper 1998: 195; our emphasis)
With the rise of pronouns in predicate position it is/’tis I seems to have become
‘formulaic’, and hence by way of a ‘splitting off ’ was able to found a ‘new family of
constructions’ – the it-ClC.
A side-product of the analysis of our examples in this part of our chapter
might be that – other than in an object ClC – me in predicate position might be the
rule in copular constructions where the subject of the matrix clause is not empty.
The two examples we have presented here are, of course, not sufficient evidence
to claim this to be a rule. As we have been primarily searching our corpora for it
is/it was x constructions and their contracted (and negated) variants, a number
of copular constructions with referential this/that as subject and a pronoun in
predicate position may have escaped us. We do, however, strongly surmise that
referentiality/emptiness of the matrix subject may have an influence on the shape
of the predicate pronoun in this early stage.