The Syntax of Cleft Sentences in Berber

This paper claims that the cleft sentence in Berber has many interesting aspects of both the simple and the complex sentences; however, this construction seems to derive from the basic simple sentence rather than from the complex sentence, since it involves just one main verb and behaves like an S, and not like an NP. The pragmatic implications of the cleft sentence reveal that the clefted constituents are generally contrasted with other constituents of the same structural status in some previous discourse. It is also argued that a WH-movement analysis of the cleft construction is intuitively plausible since clefting involves constituents being moved to the initial position of the sentence. The aim of this paper is to give a syntactic description of the cleft sentence in Berber.1 The reason for undertaking this study is that clefts in Berber pose interesting problems in terms of their structural possibilities, their pragmatic effect and their possible derivation.