This article deals with the diachronic change of pseudo-clefts in which the clefted constituent, i.e. focused part, is realized as a verb, i.e. to-infinitive, bare-infinitive, -ing. (e.g. What/All he did was help/to help her. What/All he was doing was helping her.) The analysis of the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA, 1820-2009) shows that to-infinitive is the oldest construction but was not frequently used until the early 1800s from which its use rapidly increased until the early 1900s. It was then overtaken by its competitor, the bare-infinitive, in the 1950s-1970s and fell into decline. The bare-infinitive is the early 20th century innovation rarely used before then and shows a rapid rise throughout the 1900s. The occurrence of -ing is found from the early 1900s and gradually increases until now. The replacement of to-infinitive by bare-infinitive was lead by all-clefts rather than what-clefts: All-clefts are not only higher in the overall frequency but earlier in the innovative use of bare-infinitive.

Hyeree Kim. 2017. Syntactic Variation of Wh-Clefts and the Complexity Principle: A Corpus Study. Studies in Modern Grammar 95, 37-54. This study examines variable usage between to-infinitives and bare-infinitives in wh-cleft sentences in English. There are a number of previous studies dealing with either formal and functional analyses or regional and stylistic variation of wh-clefts. This study, however, attempts to find underlying factors determining the distribution of the two alternatives and investigates whether the so-called ‘complexity principle’ proposed by Rohdenburg (1998, 2000) is valid. Mair and Winkle (2012) used ten ICE corpora as an attempt to verify two out of four hypotheses of Rohdenburg’s principle. Although their findings partially supported Rohdenburg’s claims, the paucity of data turned out to neither prove nor disprove them. This study uses a much larger corpus, the COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), and shows that all four hypotheses of the complexity principle are valid: that is, the to-infinitive is more likely to occur, (i) if do is in more complex forms (did, done, doing) rather than in the simple present forms (do, does), (ii) if some elements intervene between do and be, (iii) if be is in the past tense (was) rather than in the simple present tense (is), or (iv) if be occurs in complex forms (e.g. will be, would be) rather than in the simple present or past forms (is, was). Furthermore, this study proposes and justifies a new hypothesis for the complexity principle: that is, the to-infinitive is more likely to occur, (v) if the intervening material between what and do are more complex (or lengthy).

In this paper, I will present an analysis of two controversial phenomena in Japanese as "concealed clefts." One is the sluicing phenomenon and the other is the short answers to Wh-questions . The analysis of the first as a "concealed cleft" is already proposed in a number of works . The purpose here is to make it more precise. I will argue that the argument ellipsis hypothesis of Kim 1999 and Oku 1998 solves some old problems in Japanese syntax. First, it solves the apparent paradox with the "sluicing phenomenon," which is that some examples are clearly concealed clefts and yet allow sloppy interpretation. Secondly, it enables us to sharpen Nishigauchi`s 1990 analysis of Wh-question/answer pairs, and pinpoint exactly where Subjacency effects are detected in short answers. If the arguments in this paper hold, they provide further support for the argument ellipsis hypothesis.