This dissertation examines the syntax of the cleft construction in Standard English, in Hiberno-English and in Irish in the Principles and parameters/Minimalist theoretical framework. It develops an analysis which accounts for the data in all three, whereas previous accounts, in concentrating only on Standard English, have missed important generalisations.
The Introduction briefly sets out the problem as involving the phenomenon of syntactic displacement, a pervasive and defining property of natural human language. Acknowledgement is made of the fact that, while syntax is the focus of this work, different linguistic disciplines may approach the same data from other perspectives.
Chapter One at once introduces the core syntactic mechanisms which will be seen to be at work here and presents the grammatical facts of the construction in Standard English.
Chapter Two compares and contrasts previous theoretical thinking both on clefts and on constructions which bear representational similarity to them, and develops and motivates a movement analysis for the data, drawing both on theoretical insights and on novel data from a non-standard dialect.
Chapter Three presents cleft construction data from Hiberno-English which has received no previous treatment in the literature. It demonstrates that one of the properties of cleft constructions in Standard English which has always been taken to be categorical is in fact a locus of dialectal variation. It is shown that this data both confirms existing theoretical views on the structure of verb phrases and provides an entirely novel way of investigating that structure. It is demonstrated that a movement analysis is again preferable.
Chapter Four moves away from English and first addresses cleft constructions in Irish, finding that they parallel the Hiberno-English data in unexpected ways. The discussion then extends to Irish copular clauses, which are shown to be concealed clefts. The question of how the grammar of a substrate language could influence the grammar of the superstrate is raised and an answer germane to this construction is proposed.
The dissertation ends with a brief conclusion.