earticle

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The purpose of this paper is to examine the English It-cleft constructions in terms of their discourse function and their information structure of the focused constituents using the classification of Johansson (2002) and Hasselgård (2002). The findings of this study can be summarized as follows. Firstly, the information structure of the majority of It-clefts in English involves a clefted constituent carrying given information and a cleft clause carrying new information. Secondly, clefts with various clefted constituents have a range of discourse functions; summative seems prominent with clefted nominals, topic linking with clefted adverbials, and thematization with clefted propositional phrases and adverbials. Thirdly, there are correlations between four patterns of information structure and their discourse functions: Type A (all given) is related to Summative, Type B(given+new) with Topic linking, Type C(all new) to thematization, and Type D(new+given) to Topic lunching.