Sobre estas estruturas é que vamos falar. Ser-clefts and é que-clefts in European Portuguese

This contribution aims at bringing new elements into the debate about the status of ser-clefts and é que-clefts as cleft constructions, by applying the constructionist framework outlined by Lambrecht (2001) to European Portuguese. In this perspective, these two sentences are analysed as complex Saussurian signs, and particular attention is paid to the information structure (Halliday 1967; Lombardi Vallauri 2009). In this paper, it is argued that only three semantic-pragmatic features are systematically associated with clefts: (a) the topic is codified by the cleft clause; (b) the focus is narrow and codified in the matrix; (c) the function of CCs is usually the focus content being the asserted element, related to a content given as background. The examples have been taken from the Corpus de Referência do Português Contemporâneo – Portuguese only (CRPC), and their analysis has resulted in the identification of syntactic patterns linked to specific information structures. Finally, the controversial and problematic cases highlighted in the literature have been analysed, and their exclusion from the clefted family has been argued.