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Pragmatics: Online-First Articles

Brazilian Portuguese wh-clefts in a multilevel analytic perspective

ORCID logo | Federal University de Minas Gerais
ORCID logo | State University of Maringá
This paper presents a study on the distribution of wh-clefts – i.e. those having a nominal phrase in the cleft constituent position – in a corpus of TV interviews spoken in Brazilian Portuguese. This language variety has three types of wh-clefts, dubbed canonical, reversed and extraposed, which are analyzed in three levels: the informational-structural level, regarding the types of focus patterns; the macro-discursive level, on how these constructions distribute into topical-chain segments; and the micro-discursive level, with special attention to the rhetorical relations connecting wh-clefts to their immediate contexts. Nevertheless, only the two first levels are crucial for assessing their distribution. We put forward that the results may be explained by the features [unexpectedness] and [topicality], distributed hierarchically, since the first one forces a contextual question to become explicit, as canonical wh-clefts are considered to embed a semi-rhetorical question. The conclusion is that the notion of ‘prominence’ can connect the various results.
Keywords: Wh-clefts, Portuguese, rhetorical relations, topical chains, information structure, prominence
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The problem of motivating wh-clefts in Portuguese
  • 3.Theoretical and methodological assumptions
    • 3.1The information structure of cleft constructions
    • 3.2Topical chains and the macro-discursive structure of clefts
    • 3.3The micro-discursive distribution of cleft constructions
  • 4.Corpus and database
  • 5.The distribution of wh-clefts in Brazilian Portuguese
    • 5.1The informational-structural analysis
    • 5.2The macro-discursive analysis
    • 5.3The micro-discursive analysis
      • 5.3.1 Canonical wh-clefts
      • 5.3.2 Reversed wh-clefts
      • 5.3.3 Extraposed wh-clefts
  • 6.Discussion and implications
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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