Managing information flow through prosody in <i>it</i>-clefts

This article addresses the question of how speakers manage information flow in specificational it -clefts by balancing grammatical and prosodic choices real time. We examine this a qualitative quantitative corpus study both full reduced extracted from first London–Lund Corpus (LLC–1), whose prosody we studied combining auditory instrumental analysis. Our empirical analysis resulted following findings about cleft usage speech. Speakers have considerable freedom to choose what make prominent irrespective actual discourse-givenness constituents. Clefts allow highlight elements means two strategies, syntactic prosodic, which may reinforce each other or create their own different types prominence sequence. It always high pitch accent, signals some form reset expectations generated preceding utterances. The choice whether not produce relative clause is purely informationally motivated. Rather, clefts achieve specific unique rhetorical effects. All makes particularly useful device for responding moment informational needs shifting communicative goals.