The distribution of functional-pragmatic types of clefts in adverbial clauses

Karen Lahousse; Marijke Borremans

doi:10.1515/ling-2014-0009

Article

The distribution of functional-pragmatic types of clefts in adverbial clauses

Karen Lahousse and Marijke Borremans

Published/Copyright: April 30, 2014

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From the journal Linguistics Volume 52 Issue 3

Abstract

This paper presents the results of corpus research on the distribution of different functional-pragmatic 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.

Keywords: cleft sentences; adverbial clauses; assertion; information structure; epistemic modality

Published Online: 2014-4-30

Published in Print: 2014-5-1

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2014-0009

Keywords for this article

cleft sentences; adverbial clauses; assertion; information structure; epistemic modality