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

Cleft and identificational constructions 219
In any event, the discussion of findings from 17th and 18th-century plays
which we have presented in this section of our paper should have illustrated
that – for one thing – the correlation between IdCCs and ClCs might indeed
be translated into an historical sequence. Moreover, we believe we have found
a means of attempting to explain the rise of object pronouns in predicate position
by indicating that these are tied to referential conditions.
4. Conclusions
Let us begin our brief concluding section with yet another quote from an 18thcentury
grammarian, this time from John Burn who was Priestley’s contemporary.
In his Practical Grammar he states:
The substantive verb am or be admits a nominative before it and after it, False
syntax: ‘It is me’, ‘It was them that bought the goods, and it was me that bought for
them’. (Burn 1786: 85)
If this reflects real usage of the predicative first person pronoun, then these constructions
too were affected by a tendency that we have witnessed in the plays:
there we do indeed find alternating use of subject and object pronoun in the identificational
use, sometimes even with the same character and within a few lines.
However, we have not found a single felicitous instance with me in a subject ClC.
This does not, of course, mean that speakers did not produce such constructions.
But here we enter uncertain territory. In terms of frequency we may, however,
infer that self-identification – as well as pronominal identification of another
person – was pragmatically a frequent matter. Then what of focussing by clefting?
To begin with: was this a strategy in oral communication? Our data at least
suggest this, although it would take a much more thorough quantitative analysis to
get closer to an adequate answer.
What is basically at stake is the question as to how ‘oral’ it-ClCs really were.
All we know for sure is that they were established to some extent in LME and that
today they are largely restricted to expository written prose (Biber et al. 1999: 961).
What happened in the meantime is still open for further research. Until the results
of this research we probably have to stick with Figaro in Holcroft’s wording: ’Tis
he, ’tis she, ’tis me ’tis – I don’t know who . . . 11
11. We thank Derek Britton very much for checking our English. Moreover we thank the
referees and editors of this volume for their valuable comments during the revision process
of this paper.