Spanish Does Not Have Cleft Sentences

Abstract

English is said to distinguish clefts from pseudo-clefts. In fact, in this language both sentences behave differently in numerous respects, so the terminologicaldistinction is justifiable. The goal of this paper is to argue that, in contrast to English, Spanish does not such a distinction. To support my claim, I provide several pieces of evidence that there is no syntactic difference between clefts and pseudo-clefts. Based on this fact, I further claim that Spanish has only pseudo-clefts. Finally, I suggest that the analysis developed here allows us to provide a straightforward account of the ungrammaticality of sentences such as Fue este libro que compre ayer.