TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bevacqua, Luca
A1  - Scheffler, Tatjana
T1  - Form variation of pronominal it-clefts in written English
BT  - a corpus study in Twitter and iWeb
JF  - Linguistics vanguard
N2  - 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.
KW  - clefts
KW  - corpus study
KW  - English
KW  - emphasis
KW  - computer-mediated communication
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0066
SN  - 2199-174X
VL  - 6
IS  - 1
PB  - De Gruyter
CY  - Berlin
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Zimmermann, Malte
T1  - Contrastive focus
N2  - The article puts forward a discourse-pragmatic approach to the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. It is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms like introduction of alternatives or exhaustivity. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-pragmatic notions like hearer expectation or discourse expectability of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected a given content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark this content by means of special grammatical devices, giving rise to emphasis.
KW  - contrastive focus
KW  - emphasis
KW  - discourse expectability
Y1  - 2007
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19688
ER  -