English Cleft Constructions : Corpus Findings and Theoretical Implications ∗

The paper presents a structural analysis of three clefts constructions in English. The three constructions all provide unique options for presenting 'salient' discourse information in a particular serial order. The choice of one rather than another of these three clefts is determined by various formal and pragmatic factors. This paper reports the findings for these three types of English cleft in the ICE-GB (International corpus of English-Great Britian) and provides a constraint-based analysis of the constructions. The examples in (1) represent the canonical types of three clefts, it-cleft, wh-cleft, and inverted wh-cleft in English: (1) a. It-cleft: In fact it's their teaching material that we're using... b. Wh-cleft: What we're using is their teaching material. c. Inverted wh-cleft: Their teaching material is what we are using. I thank the participants of the conferences for comments and questions. I also thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and criticisms, which helped me reshape the paper. All remaining errors and misinterpretations are of course mine.