Complementizers in Sardinian wh-exclamatives and clefts

This paper presents data from the Sardinian dialect spoken in Baunei (Baunese), that has a distinguished complementizer system. It will be shown that wh-exclamatives in this variety pattern with the complementizer chi ‘which, who, that’ also used in clefts and relative clauses but not with the complementizer ca ‘that’ used in complement clauses of factive verbs. This observation is surprising under the analysis of Portner & Zanuttini (2003) according to whom wh-exclamatives express factivity. More support of common properties between wh-exclamatives and clefts will be provided by additional data from some Italian varieties, Basque and Greek. It will be argued in line with Guitierrez-Rexach (2008) and Demonte & Fernandez-Soriano (2009) that the complementizer chi used in wh-exclamatives and clefts in Sardinian does not encode any semantic feature such as factivity but marks finiteness and plays an information structural role, i.e. it draws the boundary between focused and background material. It will be suggested that what clefts and exclamatives have in common is that they are two different kinds of focus construction. Exclamatives express scalar focus, whereas clefts express exhaustive focus.