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  -