Brazilian Portuguese wh-clefts in a multilevel analytic perspective

Aroldo Andrade and Juliano Desiderato Antonio
Federal University de Minas Gerais | State University of Maringá

This paper presents a study on the distribution of wh-clefts – i.e. those having a nominal phrase in the cleft constituent position – in a corpus of TV interviews spoken in Brazilian Portuguese. This language variety has three types of wh-clefts, dubbed canonical, reversed and extraposed, which are analyzed in three levels: the informational-structural level, regarding the types of focus patterns; the macro-discursive level, on how these constructions distribute into topical-chain segments; and the micro-discursive level, with special attention to the rhetorical relations connecting wh-clefts to their immediate contexts. Nevertheless, only the two first levels are crucial for assessing their distribution. We put forward that the results may be explained by the features [unexpectedness] and [topicality], distributed hierarchically, since the first one forces a contextual question to become explicit, as canonical wh-clefts are considered to embed a semi-rhetorical question. The conclusion is that the notion of ‘prominence’ can connect the various results.

Publication history

Date received: 28 June 2023

Date accepted: 12 March 2024

Published online: 10 October 2024

Table of contents

Some constructions in natural language are used in specific contexts and signal the organization of discourse. Among these, we focus on wh-cleft constructions, a subgroup of clefts which have not been profoundly studied regarding their discourse distribution in the domain of Romance languages (De Cesare 2017, 561).

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