The historical development of the <i>it</i>-cleft

Patten, Amanda

doi:10.1075/sl.36.3.04pat

Cited by 3 publications

References 22 publications

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An account of the use of fronting and clefting in Cornish English

Esteban

2022

Current Issues in Linguistic Theory

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Unlike Standard English, Celtic English varieties generally use word order shifts or special syntactic devices to give emphasis to a specific clausal constituent. This study analyses the frequency of use of focusing devices in a number of Cornish English stories and compares the results with those obtained in other studies for other Celtic English varieties. Likewise, this paper attempts to provide an explanation for why Cornish English shows a preference for fronting over clefting by referring to the structure of focal constructions in Cornish. Finally, this paper offers an account of the discourse-pragmatic functions of fronting and clefting in Cornish English and compares them with those found in Standard English to provide evidence in support of its Celtic substratum.

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An account of the use of fronting and clefting in Cornish English

Esteban

2022

Current Issues in Linguistic Theory

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Specificational there-clefts

Davidse¹,

Kimps²

2016

ETC

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In this article we present functional-structural and information structure arguments for recognizing specificationalthere-clefts, i.e. clefts that specify a value for a variable. We distinguish two types which hinge on whether the matrix is a listing or a canonical existential. Listingthere-clefts enumerate one or more instances as corresponding to the variable, e.g.You are quite right David, it was engineered, seems there’s only me and you who can see this.Quantifyingthere-clefts indicate the quantity of instantiation of the variable, e.g.Look at the shape of it. There’s only one thing that’s that shape.

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Sociolinguistic variation at the grammatical/discourse level

Calude

2017

IJCL

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This paper brings together the study of sociolinguistic variation and the area of grammatical analysis by investigating demonstrative cleft constructions in spoken British English such as That’s what I wanted to talk about and This is where I saw him. Using the Spoken BNC2014S, I ask whether speaker characteristics, including gender, age, education and occupation, might be correlated with the use of demonstrative clefts and with various aspects of their structure (preference for the distal or proximal demonstrative pronoun, use of negative polarity, and use of stance adverbs). Findings suggest that in British English, demonstrative cleft use is more likely to be present in the speech of male compared to female speakers, working adults in higher-skilled occupations compared to semi-skilled adults, and in adults of middle age compared to younger adults. This work shows that even highly abstract grammatical constructions can be sensitive to speaker preferences and linguistic communicative style.

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The historical development of the it-cleft

Cited by 3 publications

References 22 publications

An account of the use of fronting and clefting in Cornish English

An account of the use of fronting and clefting in Cornish English

Specificational there-clefts

Sociolinguistic variation at the grammatical/discourse level

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