The English It Cleft

Author : Amanda Patten
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 3110279525
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The English it-Cleft written by Amanda Patten and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-12-19 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the structure and function of the English it-cleft configuration from within the framework of construction grammar. It defends a straightforward extraposition-from-NP analysis (on which the cleft clause is a restrictive relative, modifying the initial it) and claims that all types of it-cleft involve nominal predication. Support for this analysis comes from three main areas: (a) the central role of definiteness in the creation of specificational meaning, (b) the existence and makeup of predicational (and proverbial) it-clefts, and (c) the early, historical it-cleft data. In addition, the book contains a sizeable diachronic component, drawing data from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English and from the International Corpus of English - Great Britain. This investigation informs and advances what is an otherwise simple account of the English it-cleft, explaining how and why the configuration has developed an assortment of peculiar, construction-specific properties over time.

Author : F. R. Higgins
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317436814
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Pseudo-Cleft Construction in English written by F. R. Higgins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work, first published in 1979, was a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on June 22nd 1973. The ostensible central topic of this essay is a construction which is generally known as the "pseudo-cleft" construction. This essay aims to provide an overall picture of the construction, and show why another treatment of it is necessary. This book will be of interest to those pursuing the topic of copular sentences.

Author : Peter C. Collins
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317421361
Total Pages : 429 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cleft and Pseudo-Cleft Constructions in English written by Peter C. Collins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-03 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1991, this book examines the communicative properties of ‘cleft’ and ‘pseudo-cleft’ constructions in contemporary English. The book argues that these properties cannot be ignored in any attempt to provide an adequate grammatical description of the constructions. Furthermore, they provide a source of explanations for the patterns of stylistic variation displayed by clefts and pseudo-clefts. The book reports findings from a corpus-based study of clefts and pseudo-clefts in modern British English.

Author : Emma Louise Pavey
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 596 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The English It-cleft Construction written by Emma Louise Pavey and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Gerald Patrick Delahunty
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Topics in the Syntax and Semantics of English Cleft Sentences written by Gerald Patrick Delahunty and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Doris Lessing
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0060834862
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cleft written by Doris Lessing and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2007-07-31 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an ancient society solely populated by women whose childbirth cycles are controlled by the moon, community harmony is thrown into jeopardy by the unheralded birth of a boy, whose existence brings into awareness the role of gender in virtually every aspect of daily life.

Author : Katharina Hartmann
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027271127
Total Pages : 358 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cleft Structures written by Katharina Hartmann and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phenomenon of clefts is beyond doubt a golden oldie. It has captivated linguists of different disciplines for decades. The fascination arises from the unique syntax of clefts in interaction with their pragmatic and semantic interpretation. Clefts structure sentences according to the information state of the constituents contained in them. They are special as they exhibit a rather uncommon syntactic form to achieve the separation of the prominent part, either focal or topical, from the background of the clause. Despite the long-lasting interest in clefts, linguists have not yet come to an agreement on many basic questions. The articles contained in this volume address these issues from new theoretical and empirical perspectives. Based on data from about 50 languages from all over the world, this volume presents new arguments for the proper derivation of clefts, and contributes to the ongoing debate on the information-structural impact of cleft structures. Theoretically, it combines modern syntactic theorizing with investigations at the interface between grammar and information-structure.

Author : Dékány Éva Katalin
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The English Cleft Construction written by Dékány Éva Katalin and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Gabriela Bara
Publisher : GRIN Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3640554256
Total Pages : 41 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Comparison Between It-clefts and WH-Clefts: Similarities and Differences written by Gabriela Bara and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2010-03 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, Technical University of Braunschweig (Englisches Seminar), course: Introduction to Information Structure, language: English, abstract: From language to language, there are different alternatives in which a speaker can structure information. Information structure deals with the highlighting of pieces of information in sentences. Even though there are a variety of ways in which the same basic informational content can be conveyed, the preference for a particular way reveals how the speaker's semantic representation is transposed into syntactical data. Moreover, the speaker's choice for structuring information into a particular linguistic form shows the coherent way in which utterances are connected in sequences, revealing thus the importance of discourse. There are several syntactic devices that are able to encode the pragmatic information of a preferred alternative. One type of such devices used to mark information structure is cleft constructions. There are two major types of clefts: it-clefts and WH-clefts, also called pseudo-clefts. There has been claimed in the literature for a long time that cleft constructions are interchangeable. Clefts present a series of syntactic similarities, but they behave differently in discourse. The purpose of this paper is to prove that it-clefts and WH-clefts are not interchangeable. In doing so, data will be analyzed by comparing clefts as far as form, structure, and discourse functions are concerned, and eventually, in the light of given and known information, I will show the essential differences between them. Although the grammatical forms are in direct relation and determine to some degree the information structure in a cleft, apart from the syntactical level, of significant importance is the analysis of cleft constructions as integrated components of a discourse. One should take into account the natural flow of la

Author : Matthew Reeve
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027255687
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Clefts and Their Relatives written by Matthew Reeve and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cleft constructions have long presented an analytical challenge for syntactic theory. This monograph argues that clefts and related constructions cannot be analysed in a straightforwardly compositional manner. Instead, it proposes that the locality conditions on modification (for example by a restrictive relative clause) must be reformulated such that they account for the apparent compositionality of DP-internal modification whilst also permitting 'discontinuous' modification of the type which is independently needed for constructions such as relative clause extraposition. The empirical focus of the book is on clefts in English and Russian, which have a similar interpretation but considerably divergent syntactic structures. The author argues that, despite these syntactic differences, both types of cleft are mapped to their semantic interpretations in the same manner. This monograph will be essential reading for those working on cleft constructions and copular sentences more generally, and will be of interest to those working on the syntax-semantics interface.