Clefting in Discourse Analysis.

nicolas.guilliot.chez-alice.fr

The goal of this study is to correlate two independent accounts about est-ce que/qui questions in French (est-ce que/qui as a question marker, or as a decomposed element) with two independent accounts about cleft sentences (focused element in situ or displaced). Instead of trying to tease these two respective accounts apart, we argue that the two syntactic strategies do exist and compete for cleft constructions, and hence for est-ce que/qui questions: the first strategy relates to a (partial) movement strategy, whereas the second one refers to the 'relative' strategy. We give several empirical arguments in favor of that claim, based notably on the nature of complementizers (subordination versus relativization) and the distribution of specific adverbs (such as donc "then"). Interestingly, such an assumption for two competing strategies makes nice predictions with respect to the relation between focus and accentuation, typological differences, or connectivity/reconstruction effects.

2016

The author's intention is to explain how the text creates meaning with anomalous word order and to observe the potential of language to build its context of use by the analysis of two structures of marked syntax from a functional perspective, i.e. cleft sentences and reversed pseudo-clefts. Instead of having chosen independent examples coming from a computational corpus, it has been decided to analyse in detail these two structures of thematization in English in the play Sponono, written by the South African writer Alan Paton in 1965 because they are used to highlight action in the play. Due to the recurrent use of these thematization processes in the play we can perceive the feelings and thoughts of the main characters. We can also observe that these structures are used in situations of climax. Systemic Functional Grammar has been chosen as the linguistic framework because this linguistic school studies language in relation to society and analyses the main reasons for choosing...

Cleft constructions in a contrastive perspective Towards an operational taxonomy 3 The terminology used in the literature to refer to the cleft components varies quite significantly (on this issue, also see note 23). The term cleft / clefted constituent, which is used for instance in Hedberg (1988) and Calude (2009), is called differently in other studies, in particular according to the point of view that is adopted: Collins (1991: 2), for instance, prefers to use the term highlighted element, which he considers to be "neutral as to the semantic/syntactic/textual/logical role of the constituent in question" (p. 217). In his view, this element should be called identifier in propositional semantic terms, complement of the copula be (or post-copular constituent) in syntactic terms, new or comment in textual terms and focus in logical terms (cf. Collins 1991: 217). Again in line with Hedberg (1988) and Calude (2009), the same is true for what we call cleft clause: Declerck (1984) calls this part of the cleft wh-that clause, and Collins (1991) and Lambrecht (2001) label it relative clause. All of these labels have advantages and disadvantages that we cannot discuss in detail here. In a way, these labels are therefore to be interpreted as a practical, compromise solution.

Journal of English Linguistics, 1997

This is a study into the syntactic, semantic, and communicative properties of cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions in contemporary English. More precisely, it is a corpus-based study of these constructions in Modern British English. The corpora examined are the London-Lund (LL) corpus, comprising 435,000 words of spoken language, and the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) corpus, providing around one million words of written language. Chapter 1 provides a general introduction to the study, while Chapter 2 describes the database used. In Chapter 3, the author defines the classes of pseudo-cleft and cleft sentences. Readers who are familiar with the terms cleft and pseudo-cleft only through general handbooks (e.g., Quirk et al. 1985) will learn that Collins has not only looked at the most elementary types of clefts (it BE... who/that/where, etc.) and pseudo-clefts (Wh-... BE ...) but has included variant forms in his description. I shall return to this below.

On the basis of material from the International Corpus of English this paper presents a study of IT-clefts with an adverbial in cleft position. Most of these IT-clefts are of the informational-presupposition type (Prince 1978), i.e. the cleft clause conveys new information. Various textual functions of the IT-clefts are explored, using the classification of Johansson (2002). Unexpectedly, the function of giving contrastive focus to the cleft constituent does not seem to be predominant in this material. An alternative hypothesis is explored: the IT-cleft construction is seen primarily as a thematizing device, whereby the cleft constituent receives thematic focus (which may imply contrast) and the theme-rheme division is made particularly explicit.

Published in: Blanco, M.L. & Marín Arrese, J. (eds.) Discourse and Communication: Cognitive and Functional Perspectives. Madrid: Dykinson & Servicio de Publicaciones Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, 209-224., 2010

This paper investigates a variant of the ‘wh’-cleft construction in English illustrated by sentences such as ‘The thing that he loved most of all in the whole world was the sea’, the so called ‘th’-cleft. Following Collins (1991), such construction is considered a type of pseudo-cleft construction because of its formal and functional similarity with the ‘canonical’ pseudo-cleft with a fused relative clause introduced by a ‘wh’-interrogative. The main aim of this study is to examine th-cleft constructions in Modern English, focusing on their main discourse and informational functions. As the evidence presented from the BNC and LLC corpora suggests, th-clefts are a recognisable type of construction in English, although clearly associated with other types of pseudo-cleft. One of the main motivations that the speaker has for selecting a ‘th’-cleft rather than a ‘wh’-cleft is that the former, but not the latter, allows for expansion of the same kind as is found in other NPs occurring in other kinds of clauses, making the ‘th’-cleft a very versatile construction. In terms of discourse functions, both the basic ‘th’-cleft and reversed ‘th’-cleft (including the so called demonstrative ‘th’-clefts) generally provide a basic distribution of the information, signalling explicitly what is taken as background (coming earlier in the sentence) and what is the main communicative point or focus (towards the end). Other important functions in the use of ‘th’-clefts in discourse may be signalling an (explicit or implicit) contrast, introducing a new topic and providing a cohesive link with the previous context. Key words: Th-clefts, pseudo-clefts, English, British National Corpus, London-Lund Corpus

This paper presents the results of corpus research on the distribution of different functionalpragmatic types of it-clefts and c'est-clefts in English and French adverbial clauses. We distinguish between narrowly contrastive clefts, broadly contrastive clefts (or new information focus clefts) and non-contrastive clefts. We present the results of corpus research showing that, whereas the three types occur in asserted (or peripheral) adverbial clauses (typically causals), only narrowly contrastive clefts occur in non-asserted (or central) adverbial clauses (typically temporals). The distribution of the three functional-pragmatic types of clefts is explained on the basis of the interaction between information structure, epistemic modality and assertion. discuss the new descriptive generalization resulting from our corpus research (Section 4). In the last section we explain the observation (Section 5).

2000

Proceedings of Chicago Linguistics Society, 2013

In Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski (eds.),The Grammar-Pragmatics Interface: Essays in Honor of Jeanette K. Gundel. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series. Pp. 49-76, 2007

2006

The present article investigates the discourse status of subordinate sentences, i.e., it considers the context change potential of dependent clauses. It is argued that (subordinate) clauses are associated with certain grammatical phenomena that mark them as anaphoric (i.e., familiar) or as focal, introducing new information into the discourse. As with noun phrases, these phenomena are: (i) morphological marking on the head (choice of verbal mood), (ii) phonological stress pattern, and most importantly syntactic position (iii), in the sense that discourse-old and discourse-new clauses are associated with different positions, an idea that comes close to a Mapping Hypothesis, as originally proposed for noun phrases by Diesing (1992). The claim is that dependent indicative verb second clauses in German undergo extraposition which is not semantically vacuous. This movement step places them into a quasi-paratactic position from which the relevant clauses act as assertions. Thus in contrast to complementizercontaining verb-final, i.e., canonical, subordinate clauses, these dependent verb second clauses have illocutionary force and mark new information. It is furthermore argued that related phenomena can be observed in other languages: for example, the Romance languages signalize the new information-givenness distinction and the presence vs. absence of illocutionary force (partly) by the use of verbal mood-a factor which plays an important role in German(ic) as well.

Language and Cognitive Processes, 1995

In this paper, I present a view of the relative roles of logical presupposition and shared knowledge in -cleft constructions. I will argue for for a view of -clefts in which presupposition on the one hand, and indicators of shared information on the other, are understood to have separate functions: indicators of shared knowledge, including prosody, are argued to relate to a speaker's about the state of the hearer's knowledge and attention, while presuppositions generated on the basis of syntactic form are argued to indicate a speaker's for what should be included within the hearer's discourse model. In the light of this view, I review three common assumptions about clefts relating in particular to the interrelationship of logical presupposition, shared knowledge, and prosody, a n d s h o w h o w the view argued for here gives an improved analysis of some previously problematic examples. Finally, I m a k e some suggestions regarding what a strict separation between logical presupposition and shared knowledge might imply for psychological accounts of how -clefts are processed.

Journal of Pragmatics, 1996

Cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions in English have always been a testing ground for linguistic frameworks: generative in the sixties and early seventies, presuppositional in the seventies and early eighties, functional or discourse analytical in the eighties, and cognitive pragmatic in the nineties.