A Cognitive Study On The It-Cleft Construction

As a special syntactic structure and focus marking method,it-cleft construction has been widely concerned by scholars at home and abroad.Previous studies on it-cleft construction are mostly focused on its form and function.In recent years,with the in-depth study of this construction,some relevant cases have been gradually discovered.However,scholars hold different views on their definition and classification,and there are few systematic studies on such problems throughout the literature.In view of this,this thesis attempts to analyze the syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasies of it-cleft construction under the framework of figure-ground theory,aiming at a deeper understanding of mechanism and classification of it-cleft construction.The research questions in this thesis are as follows:(1)What are the syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasies of it-cleft construction?(2)Is there any peripheral construction in the it-cleft construction?The findings of this thesis are as follows:(1)Syntactically,the it-cleft construction can realize the transformation between clefted constituents and cleft clauses.However,this transformation is not completely arbitrary.The transformation condition is that the cleft constituents should have unknown temporal and spatial characteristics,while the cleft clauses should have known temporal and spatial characteristics and play a role in characterizing cleft constituents.(2)Semantically,the it-cleft construction has the semantic features of existential presupposition,contrastiveness and exclusiveness,definiteness and states-of-affairs.(3)On the basis of analyzing the syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasies of it-cleft construction,this thesis holds that there is a dispute about the classification standard of it-cleft construction in academia at present.Among the four existing peripheral constructions,the idiomatic type and predicative type it-cleft constructions do not conform to the characteristics of it-cleft construction,while informative presupposition and special specification it-cleft constructions conform to the characteristics of it-cleft construction.The research contributions of this thesis are as follows: Theoretically,on the one hand,this thesis studies it-cleft construction based on figure-ground theory,which provides a cognitive perspective for the research of it-cleft construction and expands the application of figure-ground theory in syntax.On the other hand,this thesis tries to define and classify the it-cleft construction,and clarifies the relationship between several types of it-cleft constructions,which enriches the research on it-cleft construction.Practically,this thesis discusses the syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasies of it-cleft construction in detail,which provides theoretical and practical support for language teaching,second language learning and translation research to some extent.