WH-clefs and left-dislocation in English conversation

Dialogic Contexts as Motivations for Syntactic Change

“…Rather, dialogic contexts appear to have played an important role, most especially in the case of ALL-clefts. This is consistent with Kim's (1995) finding that WH-clefts are used in conversation mainly to signal a counter-active, i.e. dialogic, stance in spontaneous conversation.…”

Information Structure and Discourse Function of Amalgam Wh-Clefts

“…In written English (Jones and Jones 1985), wh-clefts often occur at transition points as writers turn from one idea to the next. In conversation (Kim 1995), wh-clefts are used to re-orient the course of the ongoing talk, for example, when resuming a temporarily suspended topic after a digression. This topic shift function can be seen in example (13), taken from a question-and-answer session after a guided tour of the Hoover Dam.…”

What they highlight is…: The discourse functions of basic wh-clefts in lectures

“…Collins 1991Collins , 2006Herriman 2003Herriman , 2004, in dialogic or spontaneous conversational speech (Kim 1995;Miller and Weinert 1998), and in a spoken corpus containing very few lectures (the London-Lund Corpus of spoken British English in Collins 1991 and. However, the typical nature of the lecture as a (semi-) planned, spoken public monologue with a chiefly pedagogical purpose means findings from such genres cannot reliably be extrapolated to this genre.…”