Blast off!

When SC left on Thursday, it was with the promise of initiating a couple of new features. Due to the serendipitous discovery of additional blog material during the trip, the introduction of "Cracker Barrel Philosophy of Science" is being slightly postponed ([can't use all your good material up front -- ed.]). However, without further ado, we bring you...Blasts From The Past!

When SC decided to start this feature, it was in no small part because of the day that he went into a library to get "Everything Linguists Always Wanted to Know About Logic", a great book by the late, very much missed Jim McCawley -- and came out with "Studies Out in Left Field", a great book consisting of "Defamatory Essays Presented to James D. McCawley on the Occasion of His 33rd or 34th Birthday". With all due respect to the individuals about to be named, all of whom are important figures in the history of modern linguistics, this is, in the judgment of the Semantic Compositions editorial staff, a more interesting title than "To Honor Roman Jakobson" or "A Festschrift for Morris Halle" or even the somewhat more suggestive "The View from Building 20". Inside, it only gets better. Thus, SC presents the inaugural blast, from "Studies Out in Left Field", an essay -- in its entirety -- by Charles Fillmore:

A Contribution to the Repertory of Examples

A stacked relative clause construction, (or, simply, a stacked relative) is a construction in which a relative clause modifies a nominal construction already containing a relative clause. A cleft sentence is a sentence one of whose constituents is introduced by anticipatory IT.[1] A sentence which exhibits simultaneously stackedness and cleavage is the following:

It's my buxom cousin who's wearing a low-cut sweater
that's a good example of a cleft stacked relative.

Note
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[1] It's extremely important to distinguish cleft sentences from pseudo-cleft sentences.
Instances of cleavage have IT in front; instances of pseudo-cleavage have WHAT in front.

Prof. Fillmore has already graciously taken the trouble of laying out the relevant syntactic issues, so all that Semantic Compositions will add is that: 1) he appreciates that John Lawler previously went to the trouble of typing this all in, and 2) for non-linguists, back in the 1970s, cleft sentences were an important diagnostic tool for a variety of "movement" issues, where phrases were held to start out at one place in a sentence's structure, and move somewhere else based on rules. More than that would demand a whole sequence of posts, and the "raising" of funds so that SC would have more "control" of how much time he can spend blogging ([it's groaning in embarrassment that's a good example of how you want to kill me -- ed.]).