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This study examines it -clefts in four- and five-year-old English-speaking children using a truth-value judgment task. The goal was to find out whether children (i) observe principle C in clefts like It was Spot that he brushed and (ii) access bound-variable interpretations in clefts like It was her pig that every girl carried , despite the lack of c-command between relevant elements in the surface representation. Our experimental finding was that children behave like adults. This suggests that children do not rely solely on the word order of sentences encountered in their linguistic input, but use mechanisms made available by innate linguistic knowledge for interpretation.

This book examines the structure and function of the English it-cleft configuration from within the framework of construction grammar. It defends a straightforward extraposition-from-NP analysis (on which the cleft clause is a restrictive relative, modifying the initial it) and claims that all types of it-cleft involve nominal predication. Support for this analysis comes from three main areas: (a) the central role of definiteness in the creation of specificational meaning, (b) the existence and makeup of predicational (and proverbial) it-clefts, and (c) the early, historical it-cleft data. In addition, the book contains a sizeable diachronic component, drawing data from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English and from the International Corpus of English - Great Britain. This investigation informs and advances what is an otherwise simple account of the English it-cleft, explaining how and why the configuration has developed an assortment of peculiar, construction-specific properties over time.

The paper is a part of a research that has investigated the forms and functions of the it-cleft construction in contemporary written English and Czech, with specific focus on its FSP aspects. The research presents a contrastive study of the construction in translation, using InterCorp, a parallel translation corpus. The English it-cleft construction has been described in much detail in various publications. Rather less attention has been given to the construction in Czech; in general, it-clefts seem to be less frequent in Czech than in English, which is due to the fact that Czech, as an inflectional language, has a greater range of primary means of expressing FSP (such as word-order, focalizers, etc.). One of the goals of the present study is to compare the forms and frequencies of it-clefts in Czech translated and non-translated written texts in the comparable corpus Jerome in order to determine whether the English source sentence structure tends to influence the syntax of the resulting Czech translation.

When speakers communicate, they signal to their interlocutors what their utterance is about, what parts of it constitute new and given information, and what part of it may be surprising or unexpected. The part of grammar that lets speakers do this is called information structure. Aspects such as word order, prosody, pronominality, and definiteness play important roles in information structure. This chapter will flesh out the basic notions of information structure, and it will illustrate how English information structure constructions work. Besides offering a working definition of information structure on the basis of established research in the field, the chapter will present four basic organizing principles that are at work in information structure. How these principles work will be illustrated on the basis of an inventory of English information structure constructions.