Cleft Constructions in Spoken English

ISBN-13: 9783639106398 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 240 str.

Andreea Calude

Opis

Have you ever wondered why writing is taught inschools? Why can''t we simply "do" writing, as wemanage speaking? Many people think they speak "badly"or have "bad" grammar. Typically, grammar refers towritten language but do you know that there is such athing as spoken grammar? The syntax of spokenlanguage differs greatly from that of writtenlanguage. While some constructions are only found inwriting, others are mostly found in speech, e.g.,clefts like "That''s what I had in mind". Cleftsconstitute a grammatical means for drawing attentionto the most salient part of a message. English isrich in cleft types and they are a vital tool in therepertoire of its speakers and writers. However,spoken clefts have distinct structural properties anddiscourse functions from written clefts. They arethus of interest to language teachers, particularlysince not every language has clefts. Further, somecleft clauses are syntactically non-subordinate butnonetheless discourse subordinate. This mismatch isproblematic for existing syntactic theories relyingon tightly integrated structures. Hence, clefts arealso of interest to theoretical syntax and tocomputational linguistics.

O autorze

Dr. Andreea S. Calude: Studied Linguistics and Mathematics at
the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Currently working on
language evolution at the University of Reading, UK.