Cleft sentences and questions #
Cleft sentences are an extremely common construction in Naija, making the comp:cleft relation a particularly important for the the annotation of this language. The basic cleft construction in Naija includes the phrase na im (it’s him), followed by a verb phrase, though a number of variants exist. The following provides several such examples.
Example 1 #
Example 2 #
Example 3 #
Example 4 #
The comp:cleft relation is also used in questions containing interrogative words such as who or where. In such cases, the wh-word is annotated as the root, and is connected to the verb via a comp:cleft relation.