What is it that requires or constrains clefts? (Dis)Favouring factors for clefting in Germanic and Romance

The behaviour of languages with respect to cleft sentences is subject to a great degree of variation. On the one hand there are Romance languages such as some dialects of the Veneto (Italy) in which clefting is the only syntactic strategy to form subject questions (Poletto and Vanelli 1997); on the other languages such as Standard German strongly constrain the availability of clefts (Durrell 2002: 479; Fischer 2009). The aim of the present contribution is to shed some light on the factors which favour clefting and those which inhibit it. On the basis of a thorough analysis of linguistic microvariation observed in Venetan varieties, it will be shown that even in the domain of mandatory clefting some restrictions apply, which enable us to draw a scale for the obligatoriness of clefting depending on the nature of the subject and on its relationship with the lexical verb. On the opposite pole, starting from German data, we will address the extent to which Verb Second, the lack of a specialised preverbal position for the subject, information structure and the availability of other pragmatic strategies may play a role in limiting cleft formation, especially for non-subject constituents. Furthermore, we will consider whether clause-type correlates with the availability of clefting and, more specifically, if wh-questions constitute a vulnerability point for clefting to enter grammatical systems. In this respect a closer look at earlier stages of English (Los 2009) and further Germanic languages such a Norwegian – which, despite being a Verb Second language, makes extensive use of clefts (Gundel 2006; Westergaard, Vangsnes and Lohndal 2017) – will offer some interesting insights to a better understanding of the factors at play.