Abstract
This article addresses the question of how speakers manage information flow in specificationalit-clefts by balancing grammatical and prosodic choices in real time. We examine this in a qualitative and quantitative corpus study of both full and reducedit-clefts extracted from the firstLondon–Lund Corpus(LLC–1), whose prosody we studied combining auditory and instrumental analysis. Our empirical analysis resulted in the following findings about cleft usage in speech. Speakers have considerable freedom to choose what information to make prominent irrespective of the actual discourse-givenness of the constituents. Clefts allow speakers to highlight elements by means of two strategies, syntactic and prosodic, which may reinforce each other or create their own different types of prominence in sequence.It-clefts always have a high first pitch accent, which signals some form of reset of the expectations generated by preceding utterances. The choice of whether or not to produce a cleft relative clause is not purely informationally motivated. Rather, reduced clefts achieve specific unique rhetorical effects. All of this makes clefts a particularly useful device for speakers responding moment by moment to informational needs and shifting communicative goals.
Highlights
When speakers produce discourse, they exchange information that is organised in a sequence of temporally ordered units
We focus on one such construction, the specificational it-cleft, e.g. (1), which is traditionally viewed as repackaging the information structure of the corresponding non-cleft sentence, (2), through a combination of syntactic, information structural and prosodic features.2 (1) It’s their credibility that’s in question. (LLC–1)3 (2) Their credibility is in question
In this article we have addressed the way speakers manage information flow in full and reduced specificational it-clefts
Summary
They exchange information that is organised in a sequence of temporally ordered units. They structure the information within and across these units in such a way that the common ground shared between speaker and hearer is constantly updated. This is referred to as information structure (Halliday 1967a) or Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Speakers can rearrange information in English either by modifying the linear order of syntactic elements or by shifting the alignment between semantic elements and syntactic functions through the use of information-packaging constructions. We focus on one such construction, the specificational it-cleft, e.g. (1), which is traditionally viewed as repackaging the information structure of the corresponding non-cleft sentence, (2), through a combination of syntactic, information structural and prosodic features.
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