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 |
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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 |