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# A Tree Adjoining Grammar Analysis of the Syntax and Semantics of *It-Clefts*

**Authors:** Chung-hye Han and Nancy Hedberg · **Year:** 2006 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar and Related Formalisms (TAG+8) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/W06-1505](https://aclanthology.org/W06-1505/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**1** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/han-2006-tree-adjoining-grammar-analysis-syntax/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar and Related Formalisms](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/W06-15/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W06-1505/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W06-1505.pdf)

**Authors (2)**

1. Chung-hye Han [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/145117872)
2. Nancy Hedberg [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2215047)

Citations and author metrics from OpenAlex (); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

In "It was Ohno who won" the cleft pronoun *it* and the cleft clause "who won" are argued to form one discontinuous constituent, which is a definite description. The paper rejects the expletive analysis, using the fact that the cleft pronoun can be *this* or *that* in discourse (Hedberg 2000), and the fact that a proper name can be the clefted constituent, which a head noun of a restrictive relative cannot be. The syntax is a tree-local Multi-Component TAG: the element for *it* and the element for the relative clause are one multi-component set, so their link is kept without a syntactic constituent in the derived tree. The semantics, given in a synchronous TAG, is a definite quantified phrase, THE z [won(z)] [z = Ohno]. Equative readings ("It was Ohno who won") and predicational readings ("It was a kid who beat John") come from the same frame, with the focus either a proper name or a property. It also covers wh-extraction and coordination of two clefts. There are no counts or experiments.

## Ideas

- I1. Cleft frame in `prag`: "It was X who V-ed" is stored as the definite description "the one who V-ed was X", so that a question about who won gets the same answer for the cleft and the plain sentence. Test on pairs of school sentences (cleft and plain) that must give the same answer.
- I2. Predicational or equative reading as a rule: a focus that is a proper name gives an equative frame (z = X); a common-noun focus with an indefinite article gives a predicational frame (kid(z)). Implement in `prag/src/frames.rs` with the rule shown in the frame, and count the cases on the school texts.
- I3. Existence and uniqueness presupposition: a cleft asserts that exactly one entity satisfies the clause. Store this as a presupposition in `world/src/knowledge.rs` and let the who-question code answer "who else?" from it.
- I4. Coreference inside clefts: a reflexive in the clefted position may take its antecedent from the cleft clause (the paper's Percus data). Add this case to `coref/src/sieve.rs` as an explicit rule, and measure coref F1 on the cleft sentences of the held-out set.
- I5. Keep the TAG idea out of the parser: the multi-component link can be stored as a pair of tree ids in the parse output, not as a grammar formalism. This keeps the output explainable without adding a new grammar engine.

## For Mova

Clefts and information structure: [29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure/); definiteness and the one-who form: [12. Pronouns, determiners and numerals](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/12-pronouns-determiners-numerals/); the relative clause: [25. Relative clauses](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/25-relative-clauses/); presupposition: [33. Implicature and presupposition](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/33-implicature-and-presupposition/); reference: [35. Reference and coreference](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/35-reference-and-coreference/). Code: `prag/src/frames.rs` and `prag/src/infer.rs` (cleft frame, readings), `world/src/knowledge.rs` (presupposition), `coref/src/sieve.rs` (cleft binding). Measure: answer agreement on cleft and plain pairs, and the reading assignment accuracy, run twice for determinism.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```
@inproceedings{han2006tree,
  title = {{A Tree Adjoining Grammar Analysis of the Syntax and Semantics of It-Clefts}},
  author = {Han, Chung-hye and Hedberg, Nancy},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar and Related Formalisms},
  year = {2006},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W06-1505/}
}
```

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20 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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