Form variation of pronominal it-clefts in written English
- 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.
| Author details: | Luca Bevacqua, Tatjana SchefflerORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0066 |
| ISSN: | 2199-174X |
| Title of parent work (English): | Linguistics vanguard |
| Subtitle (English): | a corpus study in Twitter and iWeb |
| Publisher: | De Gruyter |
| Place of publishing: | Berlin |
| Publication type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Date of first publication: | 2020/01/19 |
| Publication year: | 2020 |
| Release date: | 2022/10/05 |
| Tag: | English; clefts; computer-mediated communication; corpus study; emphasis |
| Volume: | 6 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Article number: | 20190066 |
| Number of pages: | 15 |
| Funding institution: | Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)German; Research Foundation (DFG) [317633480 - SFB 1287] |
| Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
| DDC classification: | 4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik |
| Peer review: | Referiert |
| Publishing method: | Open Access / Hybrid Open-Access |
| License (German): |  CC-BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International |
