Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2011

Focus in English cleft sentences: a prosodic, syntactic and discourse analysis

Sophie Herment

Résumé

It-clefts (It’s John who broke the vase), Wh-clefts (What we want is peace) and reversed Wh-clefts (That’s what we want) are syntactically analysed as focusing structures in English. However, focus can also be marked by prosodic devices such as stress, intensity, lengthening. We investigate the way prosody and syntax interact in the expression of focus through a study of about 450 examples taken from spontaneous and semi-spontaneous speech, mainly through the ICE-GB corpus. Our prosodic analysis focuses on the number of tone units (TUs), the tone unit boundaries, the place of the nucleus and the tone (F = Fall, R = Rise, FR = Fall Rise, HF = High Fall). What we call the clefted constituent (CC) is the highlighted element, and the cleft clause (CCl) corresponds to the part of the structure containing the presupposition. We show that prosody can underline the focus on the CC, give prominence to the CCl, remain neutral, or again indicate that the cleft sentence is not really used as a focusing structure.

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Dates et versions

hal-03548212 , version 1 (29-01-2022)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03548212 , version 1

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Laetitia Leonarduzzi, Sophie Herment. Focus in English cleft sentences: a prosodic, syntactic and discourse analysis. Prosody Discourse Interface Conference, Sep 2011, Salford, United Kingdom. ⟨hal-03548212⟩
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