xiii, 92 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Towards a more complete description of cleft constructions, this thesis comprises an investigation of the prosody, syntax, and information structure of IT clefts, REVERSE WH clefts, and existential THERE clefts in Spoken English. Cleft constructions were extracted from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English on the basis of syntactic characteristics, and empirical methods were developed for evaluating clefts with respect to prosody and information structure factors. Native speaker-hearer judgments about cleft constructions in authentic spoken language were gathered to provide a basis for operational definitions of PROSODIC PROMINENCE, GIVENNESS, NEWNESS, CONTRASTIVENESS, and levels of contextual RELEVANCE. While cleft constructions have conventionally been discussed as contrastive focusing devices, the current study provides empirical evidence for a more complex view of clefts. Added to past corpus studies, this thesis shows that English cleft constructions exhibit a broader range of subtypes and functions than captured by traditional accounts. / Committee in Charge: Dr. Doris L. Payne; Dr. Melissa A. Redford

The thesis aims to describe and compare the use of two English syntactic structures: sentences with a rhematic subject in the preverbal position and it-clefts with focused subject. It does so from the viewpoint of functional sentence perspective as conceived and elaborated by the members of the Prague Linguistic School and their Brno School followers. The main goal of the thesis is to determine whether the constructions are mutually exclusive or whether they can be under certain circumstances interchangeable. For the purposes of the analysis, 200 example sentences were collected from contemporary fiction, i.e. 100 for each construction. Subsequently, their relevant features were examined, especially those concerning dynamic semantic scales and realization form of the subjects; these aspects were expected to differ. The analysis has shown that each of the constructions has rather specific uses and they overlap only rarely, in sentences in which the two basic dynamic semantic scales, the Presentation Scale and the Quality Scale, intersect.