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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 23, No. 0, pp.571-586
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 30 Jan 2023
Received 21 May 2023 Revised 06 Jul 2023 Accepted 12 Jul 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.23..202307.571

All-cleft constructions in English: A corpus-based approach

Youn-Gyu Park ; Jong-Bok Kim
(1st author) M.A. student, Dept. of English Language and Literature, Kyung Hee Univ. E-mail: youngyu0406@khu.ac.kr
(corresponding author) Professor, Dept. of English Language and Literature, Kyung Hee Univ. E-mail: jongbok@khu.ac.kr


© 2023 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The English all-cleft construction, consisting of an all-cleft clause with a gap, a copula and an element licensed in the post-copula position, displays a filler-gap dependency with connectivity effect. In addition, previous literature asserts, unlike the pseudo-clef, the all-cleft construction cannot be predicational, casting several analytical and empirical questions. Key research questions include if the construction is derived from derivational processes or base-generated, what grammatical properties distinguish the construction from the related cleft constructions, and so forth. To answer some of these research questions, we have performed a comprehensive corpus investigation. Based on our corpus data, we suggest a construction-based approach to the English all-cleft that can account for its syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties, while capturing its shared properties with related cleft constructions like the pseudo-cleft.

Keywords:

all-cleft, connectivity effect, corpus, construction-based, co-varying collexeme analysis

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were talk-presented at the Summer Joint Conference of the Korean Association for Corpus Linguistics (KACL) and the Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics (KASELL) held at Korea University on June 3, 2023, and the 24th Annual International Conference of the English Department (AICED-24) held at University of Bucharest on June 10, 2023.

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2022S1A5A2A03052578).

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