@article{BevacquaScheffler2020,
  author    = {Bevacqua, Luca and Scheffler, Tatjana},
  title     = {Form variation of pronominal it-clefts in written English},
  series = {Linguistics vanguard},
  volume    = {6},
  journal   = {Linguistics vanguard},
  number    = {1},
  publisher = {De Gruyter},
  address   = {Berlin},
  issn      = {2199-174X},
  doi       = {10.1515/lingvan-2019-0066},
  pages     = {15},
  year      = {2020},
  abstract  = {Clefts are well-studied as a construction which induces emphasis on its clefted referent. However, little is known about the distribution of different stylistic forms of it-cleft variants. We report on a corpus study mining data from Twitter, targeting sentences clefting a pronoun in English. We examine the following features: case and syntactic role of the clefted pronoun, contraction of the copula, choice of complementiser and use of emphasis markers. The results show systematic associations between these features. A further comparison between the Twitter dataset and data from iWeb, a corpus of general-use web language, shows significant differences in levels of emphasis and formality, positioning Twitter language in the middle of the conceptual orality spectrum.},
  language  = {en}
}