| This thesis,on the basis of information theory and functional grammar,aims at exploring the pseudo-cleft sentences with the auxiliary verb do in BNC.Using statistics and data describing,the present study illustrates the distributions of pseudo-cleft sentences in different registers,their developments,the syntactic features of the sentence structure and the uses and classifications of focal verbs respectively.The major tools used in this thesis are SPSS and Microsoft Excel.They are used to make quantitative analyses of the differences between what-cleft and all-cleft sentences,and the distributions of them in different registers.At the same time,the samples from BNC are used to make qualitative analyses of the characteristics and the information foci of pseudo-cleft sentences.The results of the study are as follows:First,diachronically,the uses of pseudo-cleft sentences have become popular since 20th century and have showed a sharp upward trend.Synchronically,the distributions of what-cleft and all-cleft sentences in different registers have significant differences.What-cleft sentences appear more frequently in spoken forms,while all-cleft sentences appear more often in written forms.Second,in the study of the syntactic features of pseudo-cleft sentences,the subjects of "I" and "we" are more often used in the theme parts of what-cleft sentences,while the subject "you" is more usually used in all-cleft sentences.And there exist many fixed idiomatic phrases in both cleft sentences.Last,as for the focal verbs in the information parts,the focal verbs used in all-cleft sentences are more fixed than that in what-cleft sentences.Both of the cleft sentences have the same high-frequency focal verbs,such as "get".This study has provided a more comprehensive explanation of pseudo-cleft sentences from the information theory perspective,which gives a lot of help for us to get the reasons why pseudo-cleft sentences are generated and to know more uses of this sentence structure. |
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