Article published In:
Australian Review of Applied LinguisticsVol. 27:2 (2004) ► pp.63–74
Reversed what-clefts in English
Information structure and discourse function
On the basis of 572 examples taken from seven million-word corpora of written English the present study—which complements the spoken data-based studies of Oberlander & Delin (1996) and Weinert & Miller (1996)— explores the relationship between information structure and discourse role with reversed what-dzfts. The study confirms the typically summative, internal-referencing, and stage-ending-roles of the informational type upon which previous studies have concentrated (the statistically dominant type, with minimally informative highlighted element and relative clause). A second type observed by Oberlander & Delin (1996), with an ‘informative presupposition’ or ‘comment clause’, is found to occur stage-medially rather than as an ending, and furthermore to have a ‘pivotal’ (both backward-and forward-looking) discourse role. Two further types of reversed what-cleft with an informationally new highlighted element are identified. Both can occur stage-initially, and share some similarities with basic what-clefts and it-clefts in their discourse behaviour.
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Calude, Andreea S.
2008. Demonstrative clefts and double cleft constructions in spontaneous spoken English*. Studia Linguistica 62:1 ► pp. 78 ff. 
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2017. Sociolinguistic variation at the grammatical/discourse level. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22:3 ► pp. 429 ff.
Faghiri, Pegah & Pollet Samvelian
2021. A corpus-based description of cleft constructions in Persian. Faits de Langues 52:1 ► pp. 183 ff.
Maschler, Yael, Jan Lindström & Elwys De Stefani
2023. Pseudo-clefts: An interactional analysis across languages. Lingua 291 ► pp. 103538 ff.
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