Clefts in contrast: a contrastive study of it clefts and wh clefts in English and Swedish texts and translations

Abstract

This paper presents corpus-elicited contrastive data relevant to the interand intralanguage study of cleft constructions. It is shown that even in closely related languages like English and Swedish, the frequency and distribution of different types of cleft constructions vary greatly. Previous approaches to the study of clefts in English have attempted to derive distributional differences between types of clefts from their syntactic, semantic, or informational properties, or from processing constraints. However, these analyses do not easily carry over to the contrastive data presented here. In particular, attempts to account for the distribution of different types cleft in English in terms of independent factors cannot account for the correspondences found in translated texts. The aims of this paper are (a) to present a methodology for establishing differences between languages based on the study of authentic texts, (b) to show that closely related languages like English and Swedish d

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