Cleft Existentials in English  

Oleh:

Collins, Peter

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 14 no. 4 (1992), page 419-433.
Fulltext: 14_04_Collins.pdf (909.88KB)

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Perpustakaan PKBB Nomor Panggil: 405/LAS/c Non-tandon: tidak ada Tandon: 1

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This paper reports findings from a corpus-based study of rhereclefts, here proposed as representing a subclass of the existential rhere construction in English. 77rere-clefts are claimed to be relatable, like &clefts, to a more basic structure by means of a clefting operation which introduces a dummy subject and be. (Compare the there-cleft, ‘Ihere ore rwo chirifren (who) srurred raking or eighr monrhs with the ordinary rhere-construction, lXere are &i&en who Starr raking ar eight months. The former is propositionally equivalent to Two children srarred raking at eighr nwnrhs, but the latter is not equivalent to Children sran rulking ar eighr monrhs.) i’hre-clefts are noted to have several distinctive syntactic properties, and to be classifiable into subtypes. Whereas ir-clefts are used, it is claimed, to highlight the identity of a discourse entity or circumstance (one whose existence is presupposed), rhere-clefts assert the existence of a situation or occurrence of an activity. There are thematic and informational similarities between the constructions, but also some interesting differences to be noted. The corpus for the study consists of both written and spoken samples of contemporary Australian English (a number from the Australian Corpus of English developed in collaboration with colleagues at Maquarie University). The advantages of a corpus-based approach (providing a source of data on frequency and distribution; facilitating investigation of discourse functions) are discussed and demonstrated.

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