The state of clefts in Caboverdean

In Caboverdean, a Portuguese-related West African language, cleft constructions reveal a variety of elements and word orders, and this is coherent with the crosslinguistic descriptions of these idiosyncratic sentences. But one of the Caboverdean properties stands out: in some contexts corresponding to English it-clefts (here referred to as clefts), the verb BE is not pronounced. This study provides an account for this phenomenon, in which Caboverdean differs from European Portuguese. It is empirically based on the oral corpus LUDViC and takes as a theoretical background the analysis in Delin & Oberlander (2000) that an it-cleft includes an original eventuality (in the subordinate clause) and a created state (expressed by BE, in the main clause), which explains why speakers opt for this type of sentence. Then my own extensions to this idea involve the core ontological opposition between events and facts (Vendler 1967), putting forward this main proposal: Caboverdean speakers use clefts rather than simple declarative sentences because they intend to present that cleft-state as a fact, which is atemporal and therefore may have relevance at the time of utterance regardless of the embedded eventuality temporal location. This also implies that the silent form of BE in the referred Caboverdean clefts – which still are, after all, complex sentences – is é, not because this form is “grammaticalised”, but because it carries a default temporal meaning.