First published in 1991, this book examines the communicative properties of ‘cleft’ and ‘pseudo-cleft’ constructions in contemporary English.
Author: Peter C. Collins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781317421375
Category: Language Arts & Disciplines
Page: 242
View: 628
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.
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: F. R. Higgins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781317436812
Category: Language Arts & Disciplines
Page: 404
View: 877
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.
1 Approaches to the study of cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions 1.1 Introduction This book examines the communicative properties of 'cleft' and ...
Author: Peter C. Collins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781317421368
Category: Language Arts & Disciplines
Page: 242
View: 836
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.
This book examines the structure and function of the English it-cleft configuration from within the framework of construction grammar.
Author: Amanda Patten
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 9783110279528
Category: Language Arts & Disciplines
Page: 274
View: 841
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: Anna-Maria De CesarePublish On: 2014-11-10
The volume describes the frequency, the forms and the functions of different cleft construction types across two language families: the Romance languages (with discussion of Italian, French and Spanish data) and the Germanic languages (with ...
Author: Anna-Maria De Cesare
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 9783110361872
Category: Language Arts & Disciplines
Page: 426
View: 636
The volume describes the frequency, the forms and the functions of different cleft construction types across two language families: the Romance languages (with discussion of Italian, French and Spanish data) and the Germanic languages (with focus on English, German, Swiss German and Danish).
Cleft and Pseudo - Cleft Constructions English has two related constructions in which a constituent of a corresponding simpler sentence appears in predicate ...
Author: James D. McCawley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226556298
Category: Language Arts & Disciplines
Page: 809
View: 716
Comprises a thorough treatment of the syntactic structures of English, beginning with an overview to syntactic analysis and progressing through the major constructions and processes of English grammar. Updates from the 1988 edition include sections on appositive constructions, parasitic gaps, contrastive negation, and comparative conditional sentences and expanded coverage of cleft sentences and free relatives. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
This new edition includes: -concise descriptions of the main grammatical phenomena of German and their use -examples of grammar taken from contemporary German, helping you to understand the underlying grammatical principles more quickly ...
Author: Martin Durrell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781444120165
Category: Foreign Language Study
Page: 553
View: 332
Long trusted as the most comprehensive, up-to-date and user-friendly grammar available, HAMMER'S GERMAN GRAMMAR AND USAGEprovides you with a complete guide to German as it is written and spoken today. This new edition includes: -concise descriptions of the main grammatical phenomena of German and their use -examples of grammar taken from contemporary German, helping you to understand the underlying grammatical principles more quickly -invaluable guidance on pronunciation and the German accent -discussion of new words from English roots such as 'zertweeten' ('to tweet'), helping you to communicate in German as used by Germans today -clarification on the spelling reform and current spellings of German, thus increasing your confidence while writing and reading in German. Praised for its clear layout and lucid explanations, this new edition distinguishes the most common forms of usage, both formal and informal, and offers you a combination of reference grammar and manual of current usage that you will find invaluable, whether a student or a teacher, at intermediate or advanced level.
U 2 . . . TUIRTH , J••1974 . DERIVATION OF CLEFT SENTENCES A . PAPER
PRESENTED AT THE LSA ANNUAL MEETING : AKKAJIAN , A + . 1970 . ON
DERIVING CLEFT SENTENCES FROM PSEUDO - CLEFT SENTENCES A
LINGUISTIC ...
Author: Lawrence R. Smith
Publisher: St. John's, Nfld. Canada ; New Canaan, Conn. : Information Reduction Research
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, ...
Author: Gabriela Bara
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 9783640553853
Category: Literary Collections
Page: 16
View: 526
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 language in a discourse, the surrounding information and the linguistic context in which clefts occur. This paper will present a parallelism in form, structure, and discourse functions between it-clefts and WH-clefts, and show that despite the symmetry in form and structure, the different discourse functions reveal clefts as autonomous and distinct syntactic devices.
The pseudo - cleft construction in English . Ph.D. dissertation , MIT . Republished
1986 , Garland Press . Hockett , Charles A. 1958. A course in modern linguistics .
New York : Macmillan . Horn , Laurence R. 1981. Exhaustiveness and the ...
