Cleft partitionings in Japanese, Burmese and Chinese

The article presents the first comparative overview and analysis of clefting and related focusing strategies involving clauses with nominalizers in three (South) East Asian languages: Japanese, Burmese, and Mandarin Chinese. The three languages exhibit parametric variation as to whether focusing requires the overt partitioning into a focused cleft constituent and a background clause with a nominalizer (Mandarin) or not (Japanese, Burmese). A major finding is that syntactic partitioning is brought about in two different ways in the languages under discussion: Base-generated clefts (Japanese, Burmese) vs. movement clefts (Japanese, Mandarin). Semantically, cleft structures come with an exhaustive interpretation in all three languages. We hypothesize that, crosslinguistically, syntactic partitioning is a necessary, though not a sufficient condition for exhaustiveness effects with focus. Keywords: Cleft; exhaustiveness; partitioning; shì…de-cleft; nominalizer; East Asian; South East Asian; Mandarin Chinese; Burmese; Japanese