Rather like English examples such as It is that he is a genius, Korean also has what has been called an inferential cleft construction . This paper looks at the motivations of why speakers would introduce such a construction instead of using a simple declarative sentence, at what kind of semantic and pragmatic relations are evoked in the construction, and at grammatical properties of the construction of interest. In particular, the paper shows that unlike the English counterpart, the Korean inferential construction has no expletive pronoun, and conveys much wider inferential relationships such as explanation, reason, cause, consequence, and even paraphrase. This wide array of uses allows the construction to be used to facilitate cohesion in a variety of contexts.
1. Introduction
2. Cleft Constructions in Korean
3. Interpretive Properties of the Inferential Cleft
4. The Syntax of the Inferential Cleft
5. Conclusion