The functionality of it-clefts in selected discourses: The message in the medium

Abstract

Information in a discourse can be obtained by analyzing several different linguistic properties of the discourse. Various syntactic and semantic triggers provide clues to the complex informational structure of a discourse. For the purposes of this investigation, we selected several discourses taken from a series of wire service messages dealing with terrorist incidents that occurred in Central America from 1989 to 1991. The corpus is known as the “MUC-3” corpus. Because of their inferential properties, we identified it-cleft constructions in the corpus. We argue that, despite their rarity in the corpus under investigation, it-clefts provide additional information, and do not just contrast or emphasize focused linguistic material, such as noun or prepositional phrases. By substituting so-called “normal” word order, or SVO paraphrases, for the it-clefts in the messages, we determined what information the it-cleft sentences provided in the discourse. Our investigation reveals that, as a subset of the information that can be obtained in a discourse, it-clefts can be used to avoid conflicting or differing interpretations inherent in their SVO paraphrases, thereby minimizing possible confusion regarding the interpretation of what the author is trying to communicate. In some cases the speaker/writer's point of view or attitude about the subject matter being discussed is also revealed. For example, we show how a focused generic noun phrase in an it-cleft sentence provides a clearer statement of the author's intended meaning.