Pseudo-clefts: An interactional analysis across languages

In this introduction to the special issue "Pseudo-Clefts from a Comparative Pragmatic Typological Perspective", we first discuss the current state of research on the use of pseudo-cleft-like structures in talk-in-interaction. We then compare their use in the six languages investigated in this special issue: French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin and Swedish, focusing on both structural features and interactional aspects of pseudo-clefts, as they emerge in social interaction. While there have been some previous interactional linguistic studies of pseudo-clefts in a variety of languages, there has been no study systematically investigating this structure from a comparative and interactional cross-language perspective. Our introduction is thus motivated by the need to fill in this gap. Specifically, we compare the six languages with respect to syntactic and lexico-semantic variation, and with respect to prosodic and embodied features of pseudocleft turns. We argue that the findings point to universal interactional motivations for the grammatical properties of this structure, and that the analysis of pseudo-clefts occurring in natural, face-to-face interaction needs to pay close attention to two central dimensions of talk: temporality and embodiment. (c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.