Cleft sentences in English
A comprehensive view
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4168545 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Edward G Fichtner (Queens College, CUNY, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1993 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-30 |
| Publication date | 1993-04-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | WORD (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0043-7956 • E-ISSN: 2373-5112 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00437956.1993.11435891 |
| OpenAlex | W1188439115 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 11 |
This article addresses four questions: first, what sentence patterns may be considered ‘cleft sentences’; second, how they are related to one another; third, what function they serve within the larger structure of English; and fourth, where within the structure of English they may be situated. It is shown that there are three cleft sentence patterns which are produced by a single set of operations on a normal English sentence; each of the three-simple clefts, WH-clefts, and IT-clefts-is the output of a different stage of these operations. Cleft sentences, like structures introduced by it and there, belong to the group of Topic-Comment Redistribution transformations. These allow the speaker or writer to shift some of the component elements of a sentence to different positions, in order to make those elements more prominent, and to make the sequence of elements in the sentence conform more closely to the sequence of ideas in the text of which that sentence is a part
Linguistics · Natural language processing · Sentence · Sequence (biology · Set (abstract data type · Word order · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
A Comprehensive grammar of the English language
English and German syntax. A contrastive analysis on generative-tagmemic principles
The cleft sentence A base-generated perspective
Towards a functional description of cleft constructions
Discourse functions of five English sentence types
Predicational clefts
The pragmatics of it-clefts and WH-clefts
Where do Cleft Sentences Come from
A Comparison of Wh-Clefts and it-Clefts in Discourse
Syntax
| Citations per year | 0.03 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1997 - 1997 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |