On the frozenness of go wrong pseudo-clefts

The aim of the article is to test the hypothesis that go wrong pseudo-clefts might be frozen sequences with specific meaning and to establish the semantics and pragmatics of these structures. The research is based on a corpus of 880 occurrences (487 pseudo-clefts and 393 reversed pseudo-clefts) collected from the COCA, the BNC and English Web 2021 (enTenTen21) available on SketchEngine. It confronts different approaches to pseudo-clefts; in particular, it draws on studies of pseudo-clefts in interaction and conversation arguing that pseudo-clefts are “not lexically open grammatical constructions” (Hopper [2004]) to shed light on the question of whether pseudo-clefts should be considered as derived from more basic counterparts. The article also uses these studies to explore whether the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of go wrong pseudo-clefts are specific to those structures or can be accounted for by the features of the category of pseudo-clefts as a whole. Studying go wrong pseudo-clefts both quantitatively and qualitatively, the article shows that they are semantically frozen structures, since they do not feature the same meaning of the go wrong idiom as non-cleft sentences: go wrong pseudo-clefts do not identify the situation that “bec[a]me unpleasant and [was] not a success” (Cambridge dictionary), as is the case in “the plan went wrong” (COCA), but rather are used to establish what the cause of the problem was. Moreover, the fact that pseudo-cleft go wrong is interpreted in the same way irrespective of whether the predicative complement is a clause or a NP shows that the meaning is at least partially determined by the frozen pseudo-cleft structure itself. This is linked to the fact that a negative situation is often preconstructed in the cotext. In fact, the corpus shows that go wrong pseudo-clefts predominantly occur in contexts where the question “what went wrong?” is preconstructed more or less explicitly. The article uses this to explore the potential pragmatic frozenness of go wrong pseudo-clefts. It questions whether these clefts can be considered as pragmatically similar to do / say and especially happen clefts, which represent the great majority of pseudo-clefts used in conversation (Hopper & Thompson [2008]; Koops & Hilpert [2009]) and have been described as allowing the speaker to “delay an assertion for any of a number of pragmatic reasons” (Hopper [2001: 110]), to give speakers time to “prepare the formulation of an utterance”, to inform the co-utterer of an “imminent significant segment” (Hopper [2001: 110-111]) or to frame the portion of discourse that follows as “event, action, and paraphrase” (Hopper & Thompson [2008: 104]). The article shows that although go wrong pseudo-clefts can be used for such pragmatic reasons, their occurrence is very often linked to the speaker’s desire to signal that they are going to / are in the process of answering a question more or less explicitly preconstructed in the immediate cotext.