The historical development of the it-cleft

A comparison of two different approaches

Amanda L. Patten | Northumbria University

This paper compares two approaches to a particular grammatical change. While Ball (1991, 1994) investigates the development of the it-cleft configuration from within the generative tradition of the 1990s, I have recently re-examined the historical it-cleft data from a constructional perspective (see Patten 2010, forthcoming). In this paper, I show how our different theoretical assumptions lead us to categorize and analyse the data differently. I conclude that a constructional approach is better at interpreting the diachronic facts.

Published online: 30 November 2012
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.36.3.04pat

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Cited by other publications

Calude, Andreea S.

2017. Sociolinguistic variation at the grammatical/discourse level. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22:3 ► pp. 429 ff.

Davidse, Kristin & Ditte Kimps

2016. Specificational there-clefts. English Text Construction 9:1 ► pp. 115 ff.

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