The syntactic structure of the cleft construction in Malagasy

The pseudo-cleft analysis and the clausal complement analysis for the cleft construction in Malagasy are compared. The two are similar with respect to constituency, placement of negation and adverbials, and yet exhibit a number of differences. Restrictions on the predicate, tense-marking on locatives and PPs, multiple occurrence of adverbs, binding into PPs as well as coordination are shown to be most problematic for the pseudo-cleft account according to which the clefted phrase is the predicate and what follows it is the DP subject with an empty head noun. The obligatory empty head noun, the non-DP distribution of the suggested DP subject, clefting of adjuncts and long-distance dependency are also troublesome for this view. These facts can be straightforwardly accommodated in the clausal complement analysis in which the cleft construction has a structure in which an empty copula verb takes as complement a functional projection headed by the focus particle no, and the clefted phrase is fronted to its surface position. Certain facts concerning discontinuous phrases and the adverb daholo 'all' ostensibly support the clefted phrase being the predicate, but turn out to have no specific bearing on the cleft construction. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.