A Cognitive Contrastive Study Of The Cleft And Pseudo-cleft Sentences In English

The cleft and pseudo-cleft sentence are two essential emphatic sentences in English. They are important topics of study in English grammar. Previous studies have not paid enough attention to the meaning and use of these two sentences as different constructions. Nor have they paid enough attention to the differences between the meanings and uses of the two sentences as constructions. This thesis, from the perspective of Construction Grammar, has made a cognitive contrastive study of the two sentences in terms of form, meaning and use with linguistic data from the British National Corpus(BNC).The thesis has first studied the form and meaning of the cleft sentence as a construction. The result shows:(1) the cleft sentence is a schematic construction, and it has the form of “it be + focus + that/wh- + non-focus”, in which it be and that/wh- are fixed while the focus and non-focus are non-fixed;(2) the cleft sentence, as a schematic construction, indicates ‘contrast’, which means “it is the focus element, not other things, that is the prominent element of the event”. The ‘other things’ can be either explicit or implicit.Then the thesis has analyzed the form and meaning of the pseudo-cleft sentence as a construction. The result reveals the following facts:(1) the pseudo-cleft sentence is also a schematic construction, and it has the form of “wh-clause + be + focus”, in which wh-(what) and be are fixed elements while the focus is non-fixed;(2) the pseudo-cleft sentence expresses the meaning of ‘exclusiveness’, which means ‘this and this alone’. In other words, what the pseudo-cleft sentence emphasizes is only the focus part and has nothing to do with the content that has not been mentioned.Lastly, the thesis has made a cognitive contrastive study of the cleft and the pseudo-cleft sentences in terms of form, meaning, and use. As for the form, the pseudo-cleft sentence has relatively flexible structure compared with the cleft sentence. The focus part of the pseudo-cleft sentence can be put at the end or the beginning of the sentence, while that of the cleft sentence can only be put between the verb be and the transitional word. As for the differences of meaning, this thesis holds that the cleft sentence expresses the constructional meaning of ‘contrast’, while the pseudo-cleft sentence presents the constructional meaning of ‘exclusiveness’. The differences in meaning between the cleft and pseudo-cleft sentences lead to the different uses of these two sentences in real communication because of different communicative needs. To be specific, the cleft sentence is preferred when people want to highlight the adverbial, correct a topic, extend and propel a discourse, or summarize a discourse, while the pseudo-cleft sentence is preferred when people want to highlight the predicative and the predicate verb, initiate a passage/conversation, conclude a discourse, or retrospect the preceding content.The study of this thesis has enlarged the scope of the application of the theory of Construction Grammar, and it has reference value for students, teachers and language users in learning, teaching and using the cleft and the pseudo-cleft sentences in English.