'And that is what she did': demonstrative clefts in English writing

Abstract

English is a language particularly rich in cleft constructions, structures used to bring particular elements in focus. The present paper offers a corpus-based account of one of the most frequent types of clefts and one which has only received occasional attention in the literature, demonstrative clefts, as in 'This is how it begins'. By analysing data from a corpus of written American English from the genre of news magazines, this contribution intends to widen the scope of Andreea Calude’s work on the construction in spoken New Zealand English, the only author who has devoted considerable attention to demonstrative clefts as a separate construction. In terms of the discourse features of this construction, a notable difference found between 'that’s' (or 'that is') clefts and 'this is' clefts is that, whereas the former function almost exclusively as an anaphoric strategy, the latter combine both an anaphoric and a cataphoric use, and thus more than a quarter of 'this is' clefts in the dataset point forward in the discourse. Another finding at the discourse level is that demonstrative clefts commonly occur at turning points in the body of the text, especially at the beginning and end of the paragraph, and at the end, and less frequently, beginning of the text. These textual positions are found to be related to the three main uses of the construction in discourse: demonstrative clefts having a “double” function, whereby they look both backwards (linking) and forward (developing further), a summative function, and a topic introducing function.