Abstract
Abstract Within the framework of Construction Grammar, this study examines constructions with a cleft form containing everything, e.g., that’s everything that’s happened, in spoken British English, using the London-Lund Corpora and the British National Corpora. We trace the development of everything-clefts in recent history and make comparisons with all-clefts since both all and everything express totality. Our aim is to determine the form-meaning properties of everything-clefts, to examine whether everything-clefts too express the smallness and exhaustiveness readings associated with all-clefts, and whether everything-clefts are also dialogically contractive. The frequency per million words of everything-clefts, however, is 3.3, which is lower than for all-clefts. Also, based on the distinction between regular predicational, reverse predicational and reverse specificational everything-clefts, we find that most everything-clefts are predicational and express quality and that only a small number of reverse specificational everything-clefts express exhaustiveness and are dialogically contractive. Moreover, an even smaller number of everything-clefts also express smallness. We argue that exhaustiveness in everything-clefts stems from a metonymic link to the boundary involved in the totality meaning of everything in analogy with reverse all-clefts. The reverse exhaustive specificational everything-clefts are similar to all-clefts and clearly deserve a place in the constructional network of English specificational cleft constructions.
Published Version
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call